


evidence of a happier future

by lagaudiere



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 06:48:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21471775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagaudiere/pseuds/lagaudiere
Summary: "Eddie has been turning his memories over in his head like they used to sift through rocks at the bottoms of creek beds as children, looking for buried treasure. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, exactly, but it feels important.The memories don’t feel twenty-five, thirty years old; they feel fresh, because he just got them back and hasn’t had the opportunity to go over them until they distort and fade. He feels like he could’ve been sixteen yesterday. He didn’t enjoy being sixteen, but he thinks it was better than twenty-six or thirty-six or the years in between.He’s sorted them into careful categories that mainly revolve around every time Richie ever touched him, and he still hasn’t managed to figure out if it meant anything."Before everyone leaves Derry for the last time, Richie tells them about the guy he's dating back home in Los Angeles. Eddie feels extremely weird about it and he can't figure out why, because it's definitely not because he's jealous. Obviously it's not that.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 52
Kudos: 866





	evidence of a happier future

**Author's Note:**

> Explanatory note: This story is based almost entirely on the 2017/2019 movies except for a few details I have borrowed from the unproduced 2010 script and adapted for my purposes. Those ideas are 1) Richie is in a relationship with a guy named Steve who is also his coworker in some capacity 2) the losers defeat Pennywise by confronting and reassuring their younger selves, and no one dies. The title is also from that version. That's really all you need to know, but if you're interested you can read the script at https://mega.nz/#!ruZgTYjb!YdkiituJiupU59Au8bki4mpLEO25RGEF-9bpp0WXzdU. 
> 
> Stan is not dead in this because he doesn't appear in the 2010 script at all, so I chose to believe that it would not be in line with this version's message about confronting and overcoming childhood trauma for him to die. So this version of Stan has had a lot of therapy and knows that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem even if the problem is that you might have to fight an evil clown. 
> 
> Shout-out as always to clown chat, my greatest supporters/enablers.

“So,” Richie says, “little announcement to make, could I have the floor for a moment?” 

They’re all sitting in Derry’s second-nicest restaurant, because they’re never going back to the Jade of the Orient, an Italian place with slightly greasy plastic tablecloths. All six members of the losers’ club turn to look at Richie, who has both elbows on the table and is looking slightly nervous. 

“It’s not gonna be like Mike’s announcement, don’t worry,” Richie says hastily. “And it’s not like, a huge thing, so don’t make it a huge thing. But you guys are like, my best friends, and I just wanted you to know that I’m, uh. Gay.” 

He turns up his palms and raises his eyebrows in a gesture that suggests a magician presenting his audience with an empty hat after making the rabbit disappear, and Eddie says, “Are you joking?” 

“What? Jesus, no, Eddie.” Richie’s face falls, and Eddie instantly feels guilty. “I’m trying to be sincere here.” 

“Sorry,” Eddie says immediately, feeling all of their friends looking at him with reproach. “I was just — if you weren’t, I wouldn’t think you should… joke about it.” 

“Well, I am,” Richie says. He sounds slightly put out — and who wouldn’t be, Eddie scolds himself, by that ridiculous response. “I have all the gay credientials. I have a boyfriend, partner, whatever people say. I don’t really tell people because of the whole, stage persona, thing. But yeah.” 

“Richie!” Bev’s voice breaks through the awkwardness, and she reaches across the table to squeeze his hand. “Thank you for telling us. Really.” 

And the others all join in, a chorus of voices telling Richie they love him and they’re proud of him, and Ben is saying, “I wanna see a picture of the guy!” and Eddie’s throat feels like it’s closing up. 

Boyfriend. Partner. The words echo in his head and he doesn’t know why it fucking bothers him. Why should he care, why shouldn’t he just want Richie to be happy? 

“That’s him,” Richie says, and there’s a trace of pride in his voice as he hands his phone over to Ben and Beverly. “Steve.” 

Eddie leans over Beverly’s shoulder to look. It’s a picture of Richie with his arm around some guy, mugging for the camera like he always does. The man he’s with is maybe half a foot shorter than him, dark hair, good-looking. It’s just a snapshot but they both look, Eddie thinks, pretty fucking happy. 

“Pretty cute, right?” Richie says. “Out of my league.” 

_Cute_. The word reminds Eddie suddenly of a deluge of memories, Richie age eleven pinching his cheeks and teasing him — you’ve always been cute, Eddie! — Richie age thirteen and more drawn in on himself, more abrasive. He’d stopped saying things like that sometime around eighth grade, and Eddie could hardly ask him why. He’d told himself he was grateful for it but he thought, now, that he’d sort of missed it too. 

Eddie didn’t think he wanted to look too closely at what that meant. The conversation was moving on around him but he could feel Richie’s eyes on him, concerned. 

“Sorry,” he said abruptly, standing up from the table. “I need a second, just going to get some air.” 

He’s going to blame this on his mother, he decides; that’s a tried and true tactic and, in this case, very much fair. He can picture the precise curl of her lip when confronted with the topic of homosexuality, the expression of pure disgust. He’s never been able to fully shake that association, but he doesn’t remember feeling this exact kind of anxiety before either. He’s familiar with so many kinds of anxiety, it’s shocking to discover a new one. 

He’s outside for maybe thirty seconds before Stan follows him. He’s glaring at Eddie, and Eddie shrugs helplessly, trying to convey _sorry. I don’t know why I’m like this. _

“Hey,” he says, snapping his fingers in front of Eddie’s face like he’s snapping him out of a trance. “Hey, if you want to talk about this later, we can talk about it. But that was a big moment for him. It was tough for him to say. So get it together, okay?” 

Get it together. Right. He absolutely should. 

“Did you know?” he asks Stan instead. 

Stan shrugs. “I definitely suspected,” he says. “It’s not a big deal to me, obviously. But it is to Richie, so we’re going to go in there and be normal and supportive about it.” He says it authoritatively, like a command. 

_I am normal about it_, Eddie wants to say, _absolutely cool and normal_. But he isn’t, clearly. He can’t just be happy for Richie like all of their friends clearly are. God, what is wrong with him? 

He smiles at Stan, though, and follows him back into the restaurant, and is normal about it for the rest of the night. It doesn’t come up much, except that Bill says, “Audra’s going to be so pissed at me when I get home,” and Stan and Richie both nod in glum sympathy, and Richie says, “I bought Steve one of those I Heart Derry coffee mugs, but I don’t think that’s gonna be enough to get me out of trouble,” and Bill laughs. 

Eddie remembers that he’s married too, remembers to arrange his face into an appropriate expression of solidarity. _Marriage, am I right_? Richie’s face says, and Eddie tries to imagine it, imagine Richie being so serious about this guy that they might as well just be married. Maybe they would be if it weren’t for Richie’s career.

After a protracted argument about who’s going to pay for dinner (which ends with Beverly googling Bill’s net worth, making a shocked face, and sliding him the check), Ben says solemnly, “You know, everything else aside, I think the best times of my life have been when I’ve been with all of you.” 

That’s true for him too, Eddie realizes, and then realizes just as quickly that it’s pathetic. He thinks no one else is going to agree, but then Beverly gives a small, tight nod and Mike says, “Yeah. Me too.” 

“To making better memories,” Ben says, and they toast to it with their last round of drinks. 

That night, he keeps thinking about how they beat it, after he’d knocked Richie out of the deadlights and they’d gone sprawling together across the ground. He thinks about their younger selves appearing in front of them, just projections created by Pennywise, he thought, but they seemed so real. 

Pennywise had rounded on Stanley first, young, trembling Stanley with his hands clenched into fists at his sides. 

“Look at him, Stan,” Pennywise said. “He pretends he’s all grown up, but inside he’s the same scared little boy. He almost killed himself, isn’t that right, Stan? Too afraid to come back and find out how weak you really are.” 

Stan, their Stan, looked helpless for a moment, frozen. “I—“ he said, and then his face hardened with resolve. “You did come back,” he said to his younger self. “You made a promise and you didn’t break it. Sometimes that’s life, making a promise to yourself to just, just get through the next day, but you can do it. It’s worth it.” 

Pennywise sneered, turning away from him. “What about you, Bevvie? Oh, you grew up to be so _beautiful_, but that’s all you are, isn’t it? Underneath—“ 

Beverly pushed up her sleeves without hesitation, revealing her mottled bruises. “You don’t need to hide them,” she said. “They’re his fault, not yours.” 

They were each braver after that, each voice stronger than the last. 

“You’re going to leave Derry,” Mike said. “And more importantly, it’s going to be a better place because you were here. Your parents would be proud of you.”

“People do love you,” Ben said. “You don’t have to push them away because you’re afraid of rejection, not anymore.” 

“It’s not your fault Georgie died,” Bill said softly, without a stutter. “You were the best big brother there ever was. And you don’t have to save all your friends. We can save each other.” 

Eddie watched his younger self, standing at Richie’s side. He watched both of their eyes flicker between their adult counterparts, like they were searching their faces for something, and he didn’t know what to say. 

Then Richie had looked at his younger self and fallen to his knees, and for a moment Eddie thought things were about to go terribly wrong and then he was watching 2016 Richie wrap his arms around 1989 Richie. 

“You have nothing to be ashamed of, alright?” Richie said fiercely. “Nothing. There is nothing wrong with you.”

Eddie looked into his own thirteen-year-old eyes, watched his own mouth curl into a smirk. 

“Your ma’s calling, Eddie,” his own taunting voice said. “You better answer the phone. You’ll always answer it, won’t you? Hell, you’ll marry her.” 

“No,” Eddie said, quietly at first and then louder, “no. It’s not going to end that way.” He looked straight at Pennywise and felt no trace of fear, not at that moment. “We’re not afraid of you anymore. I think you’re afraid of us.” 

Pennywise had screamed then, screamed in pain, and Richie had beamed at him, bright-eyed and triumphant. He can’t get that look out of his head. 

The next morning, waiting for an Uber to the airport outside the Derry Townhouse, Richie turns to him and says, “Hey, Eddie, you’re cool with it, right? With the whole—“ and he makes a vague hand gesture that seems to indicate himself, generally. 

“Yes,” Eddie says. “I think — good for you. I’m glad you told us.” 

“You sure? Because it seems like you kinda freaked out last night.” 

Eddie sighs. “It’s not you,” he says. “I mean, you were talking about, you know. Having someone waiting for you at home.” This is the explanation for it he’d arrived at during the night, staring up at the ceiling and feeling like shit about feeling like shit. He’s reasoned it out, linear thinking, and this is why he feels that way. “And I mean — my marriage is over, right? You could tell it was, and after this week, it definitely is. But it has been for… a while.” 

Richie winces. “I’m sorry, man,” he says. 

“And Bill and Stan are both married,” Eddie continues, “and Ben and Beverly are obviously a thing now, so I guess it just… hit me. That I’m going to be alone.” 

“Hey, Mike’s still single,” Richie says. “You could go to Florida with him. Be each other’s wingmen, you’d clean up with the ladies.” 

“Right. I’m going to make a great first impression next to Mike. Fucking six foot four hot librarian.” 

Richie laughs. “You’re not so bad yourself, Eds,” he says, and squeezes Eddie’s shoulder briefly, just a moment of contact. “You’re gonna be just fine.” 

—  
Richie’s on a plane back to L.A. and it should be the ideal conclusion to this fucked-up little horror story. 

They fucking did it — beat the murderous nightmare clown, confronted their childhood trauma and embraced it, or whatever therapy speak Stan would use. Mike says that now that It’s dead, they shouldn’t forget again, which is kind of a mixed bag, but mostly good. 

Except that he can’t stop thinking about Eddie. 

It sucks, it really does, all of those childhood memories flooding your system all at once. He looked at Eddie standing awkwardly in that restaurant, wearing a polo shirt and looking like he’d been dropped off directly off from a convention of boring assholes who made spreadsheets all day, and Richie felt like a teenager again. 

Later, he blinked out of the glare of the deadlights to see Eddie hovering over him, hands balled into nervous fists in the fabric of his shirt, and for one unshakeable frozen moment Richie was sure Eddie was going to kiss him, and just as sure he would uproot his whole stupid life to give Eddie whatever he wanted. 

Richie is not Ben Hanscom. He is not going to be hung up on his eighth grade crush — even if that crush did definitely start before and last a whole lot longer than eighth grade. 

It’s just Derry shit, he thinks. Eddie was the first person he ever thought about that way, even before his whole thing about Matthew Broderick. Eddie was the beginning and the pinnacle of his adolescent gay crisis, and at thirteen Richie would’ve sworn, if he had dared say such a thing out loud, that he would never love anybody the way he loved Eddie Kaspbrak. 

He would never have said it out loud, but he’d carved their initials as some kind of promise to himself, some kind of solemn eighth-grader’s vow that he wouldn’t let Henry Bowers or Eddie’s mom or nightmare Paul Bunyan or anyone else change the way he felt. He hadn’t bargained for the memory-altering power of alien clowns, but he thinks if someone had told him then he’d forget Eddie someday he would have refused to believe it. 

But that was a long time ago, and he had forgotten it for all that time. Eddie’s marriage is obviously a Freudian nightmare, but it’s still a marriage, to a woman, and Eddie had clearly freaked out way more than any of the others about Richie’s big gay announcement. Eddie, who made them all listen to Whitney Houston and the “Footloose” soundtrack and who once made the mistake, deadly serious at their high school, of attempting to wear leg warmers. 

_Isn’t that just fucking dramatic irony for you_, Richie thinks sourly, leafing through the pages of a Skymall catalogue and contemplating an electronic pill dispenser. _Probably remembers all the times you could barely keep your dumb little hands off him._

_Don’t touch the other boys, Richie. _

It’s just Derry shit. He’s over it, or he’s going to be over it.

When he gets home, in the middle of the night, he doesn’t go back to his own apartment. Instead, he lets himself in with his spare key at Steve’s and tries to sneak into bed next to him, hoping he can just be there in the morning. 

“What the _hell_,” Steve says the minute Richie gets through the bedroom door. “I thought you were a murderer.” 

_I did kill someone the other day_, Richie thinks. _Do you wanna hear about that_? 

“It’s just me,” he says. “I brought you a souvenir from Derry.” 

Steve snorts derisively, turning on the bedside lamp. “Gee, thank you,” he says. “I haven’t heard from you in days, you don’t answer my phone calls even though I’m sitting here reading about how some guy was killed in a horrible hate crime in your shitty hometown, and you brought me what? A t-shirt? Do you know how close I was to getting on a plane and dragging you back home?” 

“It’s a coffee mug, actually,” Richie mumbles. 

“Whatever.” 

He looks furious, arms crossed over his chest, and Richie is just so tired. It occurs to him for the first time that he’ll never be able to tell Steve about any of it, anything that happened back in Derry. He would be nice about it, understanding and concerned, and then he would have Richie involuntarily committed. 

“Please,” he says, and his voice sounds cracked and exhausted. “I just wanted to see you, and I just wanna go to sleep.” 

Steve sighs, shakes his head even as he turns the bedside lamp off. “Fine,” he says. “You can tell me in the morning,” and he turns his face to the wall. 

Richie lies awake for what feels like hours before he finally drifts into fitful sleep. He dreams of what he saw in the deadlights, of Eddie bleeding out under his hands, of screaming as Mike and Ben try to drag him away from Eddie’s body, of feeling like his whole heart has been ripped out of his chest, chewed up, and spat out. 

It felt real, he thinks when he wakes up in the early hours of the morning with his heart pounding too loud in his ears. It still does. 

—  
There are a lot of things that seem significant now, Eddie thinks, that didn’t at the time, at least not in a way he could put a name too. Like the copy of Alpha Flight #106 he found in Richie’s bedroom. That wasn’t long before Richie moved away — 1992, and they were still reading X-Men comics. Usually they loaned each other everything they bought, swapped issues back and forth for the purposes of arguing about them, but Eddie had never known Richie to read Alpha Flight before. 

“Can I borrow this?” Eddie said, because he’d already read everything else Richie had. 

Richie looked oddly taken aback. “Sure,” he said, and added quickly, “but it’s not very good. I only got it because they were out of copies of Wolverine.” 

They went back to playing video games and Eddie forgot to read the comic until days later, looking for something to distract him from algebra homework. Richie was right, it was not very good — Mapleleaf was just a cheesy Canadian knockoff of Captain America — and he almost stopped reading when he got to the parts about AIDS, because he didn’t need that particular paranoia on his mind. 

But he kept reading up until Northstar announcing that he was gay, which was — kind of surreal. There were no gay people in comics, usually, especially not characters who had been around for years, who were actual heroes, X-Men. It seemed oddly important, in a way he couldn’t understand, for that to have changed. 

Eddie read the issue more than once. He wondered what it meant that Richie had it, when he normally didn’t buy Alpha Flight, but he decided it probably just meant they were out of Wolverine. He shoved it deep into his backpack, underneath his textbooks and crumpled social studies quizzes, which wasn’t great because it meant he had to take it to school the next day but was better than leaving it somewhere at home where his mother might find it. And he just left it in Richie’s bedroom the next time he was over, without mentioning it. 

When Richie’s parents told him, their sophomore year of high school, that they were moving to New Hampshire, Richie was furious. He talked seriously about running away from home and spending the rest of high school living in Ben’s basement. 

“We can talk on the phone,” Eddie said, trying to be helpful. 

“Right!” Richie rolled his eyes. “Does Bill call? Does Stan?” He rounded on Ben, the third member of their diminishing lunchtime group. “Did you _ever_ hear from Beverly Marsh again?” 

Ben still talked about Beverly Marsh, but it was sort of like she was a half-remembered dream or a character from a movie, except that they were all in the movie too. Those people that summer were other versions of them, Eddie sometimes thought, who did things so strange and so outside of the normal bounds of their lives they couldn’t have been entirely real. They all sent her letters, but she never wrote back, and talking about her had quickly begun to feel like talking about an imaginary friend. 

“No,” Ben admitted, looking morose. 

“Right!” Richie said again, like he’d proven a point. “Leaving Derry is like — it’s like going missing.” 

He’d sulked over it for days, and then one morning some senior guy had passed by them while they were standing by their lockers and said, “How’s your boyfriend, Tozier?” Richie’s face twisted for a moment, and then he laughed. 

“You know what?” he announced to Ben and Eddie and the hallway in general. “Fuck this place. Why the hell did you guys let me go around being sad about leaving Derry?” He slammed his locker shut, eyes wild behind his enormous glasses. “I’m not coming back here until I have so much money I can buy this town.” 

Eddie looked down at the scuffed tile under his feet, feeling momentarily sick. “We’ll miss you, though, Richie,” Ben said, always so sincere. 

Richie slumped against his locker. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “I’ll miss you guys too.” 

The idea of not seeing Richie at school every day was nothing so much as numbing. Eddie didn’t know how to think about it because it didn’t seem possible. He sort of expected, up until the last moment, that the Toziers would just call the whole thing off. 

On the morning Richie left Derry for good, Ben, Mike and Eddie biked over and said their goodbyes, and Eddie didn’t have the first idea what to say. Standing at the bottom of Richie’s driveway, he shoved his parting gift into Richie’s hands: an X-Men trade paperback with Eddie’s landline number written on the inside just in case he forgot. 

“Maybe I can come visit this summer,” he said, which was a vain hope because his mom wouldn’t even let him drive to Bangor, but Richie looked so miserable. 

“Eddie,” he said. “I…” 

And for some reason Eddie thought of Alpha Flight #106, and how he’d never said anything about it. 

“I hope you can,” Richie said, and he shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket, and that was the last time they saw each other, at least for twenty-four years. 

That night Eddie cried harder than he had in years, curled in on himself in bed and trying to stay quiet, not wanting to be comforted and certainly not by his mother. 

He loved Mike and Ben but he knew how they’d spend all their time until graduation, if all three of them even stayed that long. They’d spend it studying and keeping their heads down when someone called Mike a name from a passing car or shoved Ben or Eddie hard into the lockers at school, and staying out of trouble. He hated the thought of it, even though he was usually in favor of staying out of trouble, because he hated the thought of Richie not being there to declare that they were all being boring and he wanted to go out and do something. 

He wished he’d done or said something different, desperately, and he didn’t know what he would have wanted to do or to say and that made him cry harder, the not knowing.

Looking back on it, twenty-four years later, it felt like he’d known that he’d lost something he couldn’t get back — the last fragmented pieces of his childhood, maybe. He missed Richie so much it felt like a permanent ache in his chest, though ultimately it wasn’t for long; his aunt in upstate New York got sick and he and his mother moved in with her. 

He remembers, now, the first time he came down for breakfast in the morning and asked his mom where his inhaler was, and her eyes got wide and strange like he’d said something unexpected. She got him a new one and he thought, until he went back to Derry, that it was real. Those memories were the first to go, he thinks now, the ones where he was brave.

—  
“Soooo,” Greg from accounting says, “how are you doing, man?” 

Eddie has been staying on Greg from accounting’s couch for the past week and a half. This is a very serious imposition, because the extent of his previous relationship with Greg from accounting had been that they sometimes went out for drinks together after work and watched hockey, and Eddie doesn’t actually care about hockey that much. 

Greg is pretty fucking sick of him at this point, and Greg’s wife Janet is even more sick of him, and he’s definitely pushing the boundaries of how long you have as a sad work friend having a sad midlife crisis before you have to get your shit moderately together. 

Eddie tried staying in a hotel the first night, but he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about Bowers stabbing him through the cheek, and ended up spending most of the night pacing around the room and checking the lock on the door. Not a viable long-term situation. 

Also, how he’s doing is _not great_, because Eddie has spent his Saturday morning sitting around wearing sweatpants and scrolling through the last two years of Richie Tozier’s verified Twitter account. About half of it is self-promotion that someone else probably posted, but half of it is actually Richie, or at least his “stage persona”: dumb snarky replies to news stories and dick jokes and pictures of cats. 

There’s a picture from June 2015 of _the guy_, Steve, holding a box of donuts and looking annoyed, which Richie had captioned, _best tour manager in the fucking world_, and Eddie had opened this in a separate tab and looked at it about a dozen times. 

Greg from accounting does not want to know how weird this midlife crisis is. 

“I’m fine,” he says. 

“Have you talked to Myra at all?” Greg says. 

He has not. The last time he talked to Myra they had an absolutely apocalyptic fight, which ended with both of them crying and Eddie saying he was sorry for a range of things up to and including marrying her in the first place. She hasn’t called him since. 

“Talked to her lawyer,” Eddie says, evenly. 

“How’s, uh, the face?” Greg says. 

“Oh — fine. They gave me the stitches that dissolve, so.” 

He had told everyone at work a story about tripping while holding a kitchen knife at an unsafe angle. It suddenly occurs to him that, due to the timing of events and this objectively unbelievable story, Greg might think Myra stabbed him in the face. This seems really unfair to her, but he can’t think of how to assert that she didn’t without sounding like someone who had definitely, absolutely been stabbed in the face by his wife. 

“Listen,” Greg says. “I know you’re going through a lot right now. But the thing is, Janet’s sister is coming to visit in a couple weeks, so…” 

Eddie holds up a hand to stop him. He knew this was coming. “I get it. I’ll figure something out by the end of the week,” he promises. 

He goes to the coffee shop around the corner and scrolls through the contacts on his phone, thinking grimly that are really only six options. Can’t call Bill, who’s still in England; Ben and Beverly are right out, and Mike isn’t living anywhere in particular. 

For a moment he entertains the idea of calling Richie, of saying, _hey, I really want to get out of this city, can I come see you_? They haven’t talked since Derry, but he thinks Richie would answer, would probably say yes. 

Eddie’s a coward, though, so he calls Stan instead. 

“Hey, Stanley,” he says, staring out at the New York traffic and feeling like the world’s saddest charity case. “I’m having kind of a bad time.” 

—  
Steve is not thrilled when Richie cancels his tour dates in Reno. 

Steve is even less thrilled when Richie cancels all of his tour dates for the foreseeable future, as well as the appearance on Maron he was scheduled for and the charity thing for some kind of bone disease and basically everything he’s supposed to be doing. 

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Steve says. He’s looming imposingly in Richie’s kitchen, while Richie is just trying to eat breakfast. “You know how many people would kill for one, even one of the opportunities you’ve been given? And you just throw them all away.” 

“They can have ‘em,” Richie says, around a mouthful of muffin. “Give ‘em to some up and comer who’s got a fresh new perspective.” 

He’ll go back to doing open mics and the after-prom entertainment for drunk high school kids; he doesn’t care. He’s not faking it anymore. He used to think it was no big deal, to play that other guy on stage whose name was also Richie Tozier, but he’s sick of people thinking they know him when all they know is an imitation without an original. 

He has said this to Steve, who looked unimpressed but didn’t protest, and he’s leveling Richie with a very severe look now. “Rich,” he says, “don’t take this the wrong way, but you haven’t written your own stuff in years.” 

“I know. That’s why I need time.” 

Steve sighs. “Come on. Every time we’ve talked about this, ever, you said you were fine with the way things are. We both said that. You said you didn’t owe it to anybody to talk about your personal life and it was just like playing a character, like Colbert or whatever. Don’t act like you didn’t say that to me about a hundred times.” 

He did, and the thing was he thought it was true. He thought it was true until he remembered exactly what he was so afraid of, and then it was obvious it wasn’t. “I changed my mind, I guess,” he says. 

“Are you ever going to tell me what the fuck happened in Derry?” 

Richie takes a long sip of coffee to buy himself time. “I saw some old friends. It just made me think about some shit.” 

He can’t say, _I actually embraced my younger self and told him there wasn’t anything wrong with him, and it was pretty fucking meaningful, so I’m over being a sad closet case now._

He can’t say it made him think about how he’d spent his whole life dragging around shame he hadn’t felt when he was thirteen, when somehow no amount of insults or, honestly, credible death threats could make him feel ashamed of loving Eddie. Maybe that was just the way you felt love when you were thirteen, or maybe it was just him, the best and bravest person Richie knew. Eddie had needed someone to love him in an uncomplicated way, and Richie had tried to be that person, with an unwavering teenage conviction that hardly wanted anything in return. 

“I know that’s not it,” Steve says, rolling his eyes. “I know you didn’t come back here with a sense of artistic integrity because you ran into some people from middle school.”

“Jesus. Do you care, or is this all just about your paycheck?” 

“You know that’s not fucking fair,” Steve snaps. “I just don’t want you to do something you’ll regret and not be able to take it back.” 

It isn’t, actually, fair. It’s cruel. He knows Steve does care; he’s maybe the only person not from Derry, Maine who does. They’ve been working together for four years and have been whatever they are — _boyfriend, partner_, he said back in Derry, like they’ve ever actually had that talk beyond _hey, we’re going to keep sleeping together so we might as well stop pretending it’s a one-time thing_ — for almost as long. Steve is the person who makes all his travel arrangements and makes sure Richie isn’t too stoned to go onstage and prevents Richie from doing stupid, career-ruining shit about once a week. And they both carefully avoid pushing each other to change, in any real way. 

They have good times, but when they fight it’s the kind of fighting that has long silences in it and never really gets resolved except by both parties pretending it never happened. Richie is bad for him, because he’s never really been good for anyone. 

“A guy died in Derry, okay?” Richie says. “He got beaten to death by a bunch of teenage members of the Future Methheads of America because they saw him kissing his boyfriend in public, so forgive me for thinking a little bit about my life after that.” _About how we don’t even kiss in public in fucking Los Angeles_, he wants to say, _and I know that’s my fault, but I hate it anyway_. “I’m not gonna live my life like I’m still there, okay? I’m not doing that anymore.” 

Steve’s expression softens. “Okay,” he says. He walks over to where Richie’s sitting and puts a hand on his shoulder until Richie abandons the muffin he’s been shredding to pieces and looks up at him. 

“Can you just give me a little bit of time,” Richie says. 

“We can figure this out,” Steve says, which isn’t really an answer, but, sure. Maybe they can. 

—  
Once, at maybe age fourteen, Eddie had gotten into a really terrible fight with his mother. That wasn’t unusual, but the severity of this one was, because he’d been caught going through the boxes at the back of her closet looking for anything that was left of his father. 

She said that they shouldn’t remind themselves of unhappy memories, and he said that unhappy memories were all he had and he just wanted one good thing to hang on to, and she cried and said she didn’t understand him and why he wanted so badly to make her miserable. 

Eddie told Richie about it after school the next day, sitting alone in some empty field they’d biked to, just the two of them, and he said, “Sometimes I just wish she were dead instead of him.” 

As soon as he said it guilt overwhelmed him, like guilt always so easily had, and he said, “I didn’t… I didn’t mean that.” Internally, he was already apologizing, silently praying that no one had heard him who might have the power to make it come true. God always knew what you were thinking, his mother said. Every bad thought. 

He tried not to cry — crying in front of his friends was the worst, worse than the asthma attacks that were actually just panic — but he did anyway. 

Richie wrapped an arm around him and he said “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” a little nervously, and Eddie didn’t turn his head and cry into his shoulder, but he did think about it, for a moment. 

He thought it actually didn’t feel so terrible to cry in front of Richie. It wasn’t as humiliating as he’d thought it would, and he knew instinctively that Richie wouldn’t tell anyone. For all that he talked constantly about things that didn’t matter, he was good at keeping secrets. You could trust him with that. 

“So,” Richie said after a few long moments, when Eddie had stopped crying and was furiously wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “A penguin walks into an auto mechanic’s shop…” 

—  
“Do you think he looks like me?” Eddie says, miserably. 

They’re out at a bar because it’s Patty’s book club night and she told them to go out and have fun. It had been fun, in fact — it’s really fucking good to be friends with Stan again, even if he has in the intervening years become a guy who does yoga and talks about self-care — but then Eddie got a Twitter notification that Richie had posted something. And it’s just a promotion for some animated show he’d voiced a bit character in, but several drinks in the speed with which Eddie had swiped through to look at it is making him morose. 

Stan blinks at him. “Who?”

“The _guy_,” Eddie hisses. He can’t believe, in his current state of mind, that Stan doesn’t know this. “Richie’s — Richie’s guy. Steve.” 

Stan makes a face of pure horror. “Oh, god. I don’t know, Eddie.” 

Eddie knocks back half his of his vodka cranberry. “I think he kind of does, objectively. You can see it if you look closely. He’s like my height.” He laughs. “Fuck Richie making fun of me for being short!” 

“Where did you even find a picture of this guy?” Stan says weakly. 

“It’s on Richie’s Twitter if you go back far enough. Did you know he’s his _tour manager_? Didn’t tell us that part, did he?” 

“Okay.” Stan reaches over and takes the glass away from him. “Alright, Eddie, I think I have a responsibly to cut you off now.” 

He considers wrestling back his glass from Stan’s hand, but lets it go. 

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Eddie confesses. “That’s so fucked up, right? I just remembered my shitty awful childhood and I had to fight a clown and, and I’m getting divorced, and all I can think about is…” He trails off, not really wanting to finish the thought. 

It’s embarrassing, is what it is, it’s juvenile. And it makes him extremely selfish and extremely weird that he spends more time thinking about Richie’s relationship than the end of his own marriage. It feels like he just spent those years playing the role of someone’s husband, an actor with half the lines in an ill-fitting suit. 

Stan’s expression is soft, if not a little embarrassed for him. “You know it’s okay if you… have feelings for Richie, right?” 

_I don’t_, Eddie almost says reflexively. He’s spent a lot of time over the past weeks telling himself that he doesn’t. It wouldn’t be great if he had some kind of deep-seated, pathological aversion to one of his friends being gay, but it would be better than being — what? _Jealous_? 

That can’t be what this is, because the scope of that, of having to deal with it, is too much. Because half the time he still thinks that if Myra calls he will let himself be talked into moving back into their apartment and believing that’s the happiest he’ll ever be. 

Because it’s some kind of cruel cosmic joke that Richie held his hand and said you’re braver than you think, and maybe, just maybe, some part of Eddie had assumed it was significant. And now Richie is in Los Angeles being normal and happy and he’s here and his life is falling apart — he’s letting it, but still. 

Because if he wants something else, something he hasn’t been able to look directly at, ever, he’ll have to actually do something about it. And that, he’s pretty sure, is beyond his capabilities. 

“I don’t want to have feelings,” he mutters instead.

“I know,” Stan says gently, “but you have to honor your feelings to get through them.” 

Eddie glares at him. “I hate it so much when you talk like that.” 

Stan pats him on the shoulder. “I know that, too,” he says. “Let’s go home, okay?” 

—  
Steve asks him, after more than a few nights of Richie waking up before sunrise to visions of blood and gray water and quietly dry-heaving in the bathroom, if he’s ever going to tell him what the nightmares are about. 

“Clowns,” Richie says, still leaning against the bathroom sink. 

“_Clowns_?” 

“Yeah,” Richie says. “I have this — it’s a very common fear. Clowns are creepy, everyone knows this.” 

Steve shakes his head, looking disappointed in him. “Okay,” he says. “Are you taking something?” 

“No! Jesus.” 

Steve nods, like this was a box on a checklist he had to make sure to tick off. “I think you should talk to a therapist.” 

He should, he should, but what is a therapist going to have to say about this? About the prophetic death vision or the fact that he threw an axe into someone’s head, and doesn’t feel as guilty about that as he probably should? 

“Sure,” he says. 

Instead, he just starts spending the night less often. In absence of any reason to follow Richie around the country, Steve is picking up other jobs — audio production, which is what he’s actually good at — and it’s strange how easy it is, once that space has opened up between them, to start drifting apart. 

A couple months after they leave Derry again, Stan tells Richie in a very serious and mildly threatening tone to call Eddie. 

He won’t elaborate on why Richie is supposed to do this, and Richie flashes back to all the times in middle school he was sent to the principal’s office, only about fifty percent of the time for shit he’d actually done. 

They haven’t talked since Derry. Part of him is still halfway convinced Eddie hates him, which he knows isn’t true — they’re all bonded for life by their clown-killing ritual. But he does think, a lot, about Eddie pushing his chair back abruptly and power-walking out of that restaurant. Obviously, he put it together. Richie’s little secret. 

Richie makes himself call anyway. 

“Edward!” Richie chirps as soon as he picks up the phone. “Analyze any good risks lately?”

“I’m impressed that you remembered what my job is, you know that?” Eddie says, deadpan. “That’s very flattering.” 

“Don’t ever say I don’t listen. How’s New York, though, really?” 

“I’ve been staying with Stan, actually,” Eddie says. “They’re letting me work remotely for a while. I need to find my own place in New York, but I… haven’t. Yet.” 

It takes Richie a moment to piece together what this means. “Wow, so you actually…” 

“Why is it surprising?” Eddie snaps. “I told you it was over. It’s over.” 

“Stan didn’t tell me that.” Richie pauses, considers, then says, “He said I should call you.” 

“Stanley thinks I need to have a strong emotional support network surrounding me in this difficult time of transition,” Eddie drawls. “It’s like he joined a fucking cult. He and Patty have tried to get me to read Zen and the art of about fifty different things.” 

Richie laughs, because Eddie has never been in the same universe as the concept of Zen. “Might do you some good.” 

“I don’t think so,” Eddie says. “I think I’m going to stick with my strategy of trying to forget everything again.” 

There’s a little bitterness in his voice, a little too much truth to it. 

“Come visit me in L.A.,” Richie says, on impulse. 

There’s a moment of silence, and Richie can’t resist talking to fill it. “I mean, if you want to. You must be getting sick of Stan’s Sudoku and jigsaw puzzles. Come see me before you go back to New York.” 

He can’t read Eddie’s tone over the phone, couldn’t guess at all how he’s saying it, but he does say it. “Yeah,” he says. “I will.”

Stupid, irrational joy bubbles up in Richie’s chest. “Great,” he says. “I’m free, you know, whenever. I’ll show you all the sights. The Walk of Fame, the Hollywood sign, the Scientology center. This club I once got punched at for making a joke about 9/11.” 

“I’m regretting this already,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t say he isn’t going to come. 

After they hang up, Richie lets his head fall into his hands and smacks his palm against his forehead a couple of times like he might snap himself out of feeling idiotically happy about this. These are two worlds that should not be allowed to collide; Eddie is not part of Richie’s L.A. life and never the twain shall meet if they know what’s good for them. 

_I’m going to fuck everything up_, Richie thinks, and then, _Shit, I really need to clean my apartment._

—  
Eddie has been turning his memories over in his head like they used to sift through rocks at the bottoms of creek beds as children, looking for buried treasure. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, exactly, but it feels important. 

The memories don’t feel twenty-five, thirty years old; they feel fresh, because he just got them back and hasn’t had the opportunity to go over them until they distort and fade. He feels like he could’ve been sixteen yesterday. He didn’t enjoy being sixteen, but he thinks it was better than twenty-six or thirty-six or the years in between. 

He’s sorted them into careful categories that mainly revolve around every time Richie ever touched him, and he still hasn’t managed to figure out if it meant anything. 

They used to walk home from school with Richie’s arm casually slung around his shoulder, and then at some point they stopped. They used to make plans to go to the movies alone, and then Richie would turn up with Bill or Stan in tow and Eddie would feel oddly annoyed by for it no reason he could explain and would make sure they sat next to each other even though Richie talked incessantly every time. They used to play video games for hours on end sitting closer together than they really needed to, knees pressed together between them. He’s never been comfortable, really, with anyone else touching him so freely. 

The worst memory, he thinks, is from when they were about fifteen; they were in Bill’s basement and Eddie was having a minor crisis because it was clear Bill and Richie had smoked _marijuana_ before he got there and he didn’t even know who they could possibly be buying it from and he didn’t want to smoke with them, obviously, but they also never asked him and it would’ve been nice to be asked. 

They watched one of the Indiana Jones movies and Bill fell asleep halfway through and was resistant to their attempts to wake him up via poking him in the face and kicking his ribs. Richie was laughing even more than usual and sprawled out across the couch with his legs across Eddie’s, grinning up at him. 

“Just you and me, I guess,” he said. The movie was over and Eddie should have just gone home — would have to have another fight with his mom about staying out too late the next morning — but he didn’t want to go. 

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” he said. “I know you’re high.” 

Richie smirked, glassy-eyed. “No way. How can you tell?” 

Eddie thought about saying that marijuana could absolutely be laced with LSD or angel dust and you could die from smoking it, _really_, especially if you bought it from some creep at their high school. “You could at least ask me if I want some,” he said. 

“Do you?” Richie said, eyes wide. 

“No. But I know you think I’m too much of a stupid little kid to even ask —“ 

“No we don’t,” Richie said. He sat up and looked suddenly serious. “I don’t think that.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Eddie mumbled, avoiding his eyes. Sometimes Richie looked at him and Eddie felt like he was seeing straight through Eddie to the core of him, and Eddie didn’t even want to look at that himself. 

“You’re the best person,” Richie said. He slumped backwards with his head falling against the arm of the couch. “You’re the best one of all of us.” 

This was totally unrelated to the point Eddie had been trying to make, but it made his stomach flutter strangely. “Oh, shut up,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.” 

“You are,” Richie said, “you are, you are. Do you remember when we went swimming in the quarry and you tried to drown me?” 

Eddie glared. “That’s your supporting evidence for me being the best person ever?” 

“I’m just saying I didn’t mind,” Richie said, and Eddie didn’t know what to say in response to that, not at all. 

They fell asleep on the couch in Bill’s basement, together, and when Eddie woke up the next morning with Richie’s head on his shoulder and felt one moment of absolute panic before Bill threw a pillow at them and asked if they wanted pancakes. 

That memory is bad, but there’s another one that’s always the most worrying, actually, Eddie decides, because it’s the most recent. This one is practically present tense; the moment underneath Neibolt House when Richie took his hand and Eddie let him, Richie said “You’re braver than you think” and Eddie believed him. Who else had ever told him he was brave? Who else had ever looked at him that way? 

This is the worst memory because it means that it’s not a memory at all. It’s not some long-ago recollection underneath a haze of nostalgia that will stay firmly in the past, where it belongs. It’s in the present and it’s sticking with him and it feels like it’s going to claw its way out. 

—  
“Only one suitcase?” Richie says. “Eddie, this is a major step forward, congratulations! Have you been doing that thing where you get rid of everything you own that doesn’t spark joy?” 

Eddie rolls his eyes and pulls the handle of his suitcase away when Richie tries to take it, hoisting it into the trunk of Richie’s car himself. “No,” he says. “I just had to throw out all the shit I took with me to Derry.” 

Richie grins. “I found us a pretentious vegan restaurant to go to for dinner. You’re welcome.” 

“I’m not vegan,” Eddie says. 

“No? Am I confusing that with a different dietary restriction invented by people who think acupuncture cures cancer?” 

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, turning on his heel and pretending he’s going to march back through the doors into the airport; Richie can tell he’s surpressing a grin. 

“So, not vegan, but what… dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free?” he recites as they get into the car. “Have you tried Soylent? It’s supposed to just replace the unpleasant process of eating altogether. They tell me it’s not made of people.” 

He puts his right hand on the back of the passenger’s seat headrest as he’s backing out of his parting spot, and Eddie very slightly flinches away from the approach of his hand — just barely, but it’s there and it immediately makes Richie feel a little sick. He wonders if Eddie remembers all the time they spent casually touching each other as kids and thinks of it differently now, as something he allowed only because he didn’t have all of the facts. 

“I know none of that shit is real, you know,” Eddie says. “The gluten sensitivity and all of that. I mean, Myra gets these ideas about what component of food is like, poisoning all of us and I get sucked into thinking it’s real but — I mean, I used to do that. I don’t, still, obviously.” He looks a little lost. 

“So you are allowed to eat hamburgers now?” 

Eddie shoots him a poisonous look. “I’m allowed to. I mean, the amount of chemicals they use in factory-farmed meat is not pleasant to think about—“ 

Richie really had made a reservation at a vegan restaurant he had checked carefully against all of Eddie’s alleged dietary restrictions, but he decides abruptly that they are not going there. He changes the subject to self-driving cars because he knows Eddie will have a lot to say about how they are fundamentally both unsafe and unethical, and ten minutes later they pull up outside of In-N-Out Burger. 

Eddie jerks his head around when the car stops and gives Richie the worst case of evil eye he had ever experienced. “No. Absolutely not.” 

“Yes, come on. I know you haven’t eaten anything fried since the first Clinton administration. This will be like exposure therapy for you.” 

“That is so far from being how exposure therapy works.” He sits there glaring determinedly for a long moment, but Richie just grins back at him, and eventually he throws up how hands and then unbuckles his seatbelt. “Fine! Fine. I hope you can never get a restaurant reservation in this town again.” 

Richie orders burgers, fries and shakes for both of them and they sit in a greasy booth in the corner and Eddie continues to glare at him. When their food arrives Eddie looks at it suspiciously and begins eating the French fries very slowly, one at a time. 

“You know,” he says, “I told Stanley I was worried you were going to drag me to some party where, I don’t know, strippers would be doing cocaine off of hundred dollar bills, and he told me you were not remotely that cool. Which was obviously correct.” 

“Hey! I used to be! I could tell you stories that would make your hair curl, Edward.” 

Eddie quirked an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “Try me.”

Richie does have a couple of anecdotes about cocaine, but they’re the kind of thing Eddie finds concerning rather than funny, so he instead launches into a story about the time he and his improv group got invited to Ricky Gervais’ Halloween party and he helped his friend Tanya, who had a borderline irrational hatred for the U.K. version of The Office, steal one of Ricky Gervais’ Emmys. 

“And… you gave it back the next morning?” Eddie says expectantly. He has removed the bun and almost all the toppings from his burger and is now cutting it into tiny pieces with the side of a plastic fork, and Richie can’t help grinning at him like an absolute idiot. 

“Nope,” he says cheerfully. “Tanya probably still has it. He has a lot of awards, he didn’t need that one.” 

He knocks his knee against Eddie’s under the table, and Eddie scowls at him but he doesn’t move away or look like he’s revolted by Richie’s general existence, not any more than usual. 

He keeps talking because it’s what he always does. He tells Eddie the story that goes, “I did the first, I think, three Scientology courses, because there was this guy I really wanted to give me a writing job and he was very into it. A real evangelist. But I told them I wasn’t going to stop taking Ritalin and now I guess I’m a suppressive person.” 

And the one that goes, “One I time I almost got arrested because I had this roommate who I thought was just selling ecstasy out of our apartment, but it turned out he was selling ecstasy and also the eggs of these extremely endangered venomous snakes.” 

And “I had a manager once who actually wanted me to call myself Dick Tozier. Can you imagine that?”

“Oh, I think you should have done it,” Eddie says in response to that one. “Is it too late for you to rebrand?” 

“Working on it,” Richie says with a grin. “Hey, are you going into anaphylactic shock yet?” 

“This is slow-acting poison,” Eddie says. He’s using his straw to attempt to spear the cherry at the bottom of his empty milkshake glass, and looks very self-satisfied when he manages it. “Tastes good, but it’s still going to kill you eventually.” 

_Yeah_, Richie thinks, _he’s got a point about that_. 

—  
“Well, this is it,” Richie says when they get back to the apartment. “I’m warning you, it’s not exactly the MTV Cribs episode you were probably imagining.” 

Eddie hauls his suitcase across the threshold without any help from Richie. “I cannot believe you know who Marie Kondo is and your apartment still looks like this.” 

The apartment does appear to be clean, but that’s all you can say for it. Every surface of the place is covered in books and magazines and assorted garbage no adult man should be hanging onto, including several of those horrible Funko Pop things. The walls are equally full of movie posters, vintage bar signs, and one framed flyer for a comedy show featuring a smirking Richie Tozier, not looking old enough to legally drink. 

“What were you expecting, minimalism?” Richie says. 

Eddie makes eye contact with another photo of Richie on a nearby shelf, this one with his arm around a strange-looking man in sunglasses. “Who’s that?” 

“Tommy Wiseau,” he says, like Eddie will know who this is. “You want a drink? I have, uh, basically everything. 

“Water’s fine.” Eddie wanders around the living room while Richie disappears into the kitchen, surveying the detritus of Richie’s life. There’s so much of it, and Eddie thinks of their conversation over dinner, the endless font of anecdotes, the absurdity and celebrity sparkle of Richie’s last twenty-odd years. 

What is Eddie supposed to talk about, in response to that? He thinks, bitterly, that he could tell Richie about once winning the employee of the month award at his company twice in one year. He could tell him about the five different times he’s been sure he had appendicitis, or about how he spent his honeymoon convincing himself and his wife he had food poisoning and they never even saw the fucking barrier reefs. He’d probably love that story. 

He thinks, too, that’s there’s no real sign of anyone else’s influence here. Unless Richie’s — boyfriend, he thinks, trying to make himself comfortable with the term in case he has to say it out loud — unless he has the same aesthetically nightmarish taste as Richie, he hasn’t had much influence on this space. 

One whole shelf of Richie’s bookcase is packed with comic books, and Eddie’s leafing through them when he returns with their drinks. “Is this the stuff we used to read when we were kids?”

“Yeah! I kinda got into collecting old X-Men issues. That’s a benefit of the memory loss, I guess. Got to read ‘em all again for the first time.” 

“Do you have Alpha Flight one-oh-six?” Eddie says before he can think better of it. He doesn’t think Richie will remember, but his eyes light up with recognition.

“Oh,” he says. “I don’t, actually. Thank you for not mentioning that, at the time.” 

Eddie shrugs. “I probably should’ve mentioned it.”

“Are you kidding? ‘Hey, buddy, I noticed you’ve been reading comics about French-Canadian homosexuals, anything you want to tell me?’ I would’ve jumped off a bridge.” 

Eddie feels a terrible surge of sympathy for sixteen-year-old Richie, wishes he had been a good enough friend to see beyond his own nerves and anxieties and say even one reassuring thing, even if it was about how it was cool that Marvel was so open-minded. 

“You know… it you had told us then, it would’ve been okay.” 

Richie shakes his head, looking distant. “Half the people at school already knew, man. I don’t know how, but they did. I think even my parents kinda knew. My dad was always telling me how I was going to be so much happier in college and all the other kids in Derry were going to peak in high school. One time he made a gay joke about Ronald Reagan and then Mom made everyone sit down and have a family meeting the next day so he could apologize for being insensitive.” Richie grimaces. “I wanted things to be normal with you guys, but I kind of figured you had all guessed.” 

“I didn’t know,” Eddie says, and wishes he had. 

“Well, it’s also possible I was just paranoid.” There’s a brief, tense silence. Richie flips through a few of his comics, pulling out one with a Rob Liefeld drawing of Cable on the cover, muscles bulging in ways no human muscles have ever bulged. “God, these were bad. Can you believe we read this shit?” 

“You’re the one that _collects_ them! I haven’t thought about comics in years.” This is another strange side effect of the supernatural memory loss; after years of total disinterest in superhero movies, his brain is now full of previously inaccessible knowledge about X-Men lore. “Remember how we used to argue with Bill about Marvel versus DC?” 

“He was _obsessed_ with Batman,” Richie recalls, grinning. “And then he got Mike on his side… Stanley was with us, though, wasn’t he?” 

“Stan never used to read anything except Spider-Man and those Mark Trail compilations.” Eddie can still perfectly see Richie rolling his eyes in exaggerated boredom while Stan read out loud about woodpeckers. “And Ben and Beverly thought comics were lame, of course. They just knew better than to say it around us.” 

“Well, those losers listened to New Kids on the Block, so screw ‘em.” Richie grins. “You ever watch any of the movies? The ones with Hugh Jackman and CGI blue Jennifer Lawrence?” 

Eddie shakes his head. “No, we don’t — I mean, that’s not really my thing, as an adult with a job.” 

“You’re missing out. Besides, don’t you have to know how much it would cost the leeches you work for if Magneto attacked New York?” 

“_Leeches_?” 

“Capitalist vultures? Whatever metaphor you prefer. Watch the dumb X-Men movies with me. They’re bad, you’ll hate them so much.”

Two hours later, they’re deep into dissecting the first of the dumb X-Men movies and its various failures to comply with the canon which, Eddie finds, he remembers almost as well as Richie does. 

He’s in the middle of a vital point about Charles Xavier’s characterization when he looks at Richie and really sees him — his glasses have slipped down his nose a little and he’s laughing in a genuine way, not the ironic hollow way he does sometimes, and a stray thought about his jawline skitters across Eddie’s mind and is too discomforting to stay there for long. 

He’s looking at Eddie in a way that he might, he thinks, recognize, because he’s certain that he looks the same way, and he thinks it means_ I missed you so much I don’t know how I could stand it. _

Or maybe he’s imagining that. Probably, he thinks, it’s just wishful thinking. 

“My point is,” Eddie says. “My point is, this movie is terrible. Let’s watch the next one.”

—  
Richie is pretty sure it’s a bad sign that they barely leave the apartment for the following two days. 

A bad sign of what, he’s not sure. A bad sign for his prospects of ever totally moving on from this, probably. But, on the other and distinctly more compelling hand, a good sign for their friendship. 

With most other people he’d probably be going stir-crazy after spending more than a few hours doing nothing in particular with them, would be searching for ways to get out of the apartment. But it’s not like that with Eddie. They never run out of things to argue peacefully about.

He asks, on the second day, says, “Hey, do you want to go out tonight? I mean, you’re single, you’re in America’s sexist city. I could be your wingman. You know, I go up to some eligible bachelorette and when she finds out I’m tragically unavailable I tell her she should really be talking to my very attractive mysterious friend on the other end of the bar.” Eddie looks at him like he suggested they go out and find someone to sell them ketamine. 

“No, I don’t want to go out and attempt to get some strange woman to sleep with me, and I certainly don’t want to watch you try and do it _for_ me,” he says. 

Richie shrugs, tries to tamp down the feeling of relief. “Alright. Just wanted to check.” 

Eddie insists on making dinner that night, proclaiming Richie’s selection of frozen food and takeout menus intolerable. They go to Whole Foods together and he watches Eddie quiz a hapless employee on the origins of their salmon. 

Richie doesn’t contribute a lot to the actual cooking process, mostly just hands things to Eddie and hums the theme song to _The Odd Couple_ until Eddie begs him to stop and tries not to think the thing that he is definitely thinking, which is that this is all very much the type of thing you do if you’re an actual couple, and not that sixties sitcom heterosexual-life-partners kind. 

“Can’t remember the last time someone used that oven,” he says. 

“Don’t you have enough money to hire someone to do this?”

“Yeah, but—“ Richie starts to say, but the sound of the front door opening makes him freeze. 

“Rich,” Steve’s voice says from down the hallway, “can you please answer the fucking phone when I call you?” and Eddie drops the bottle of wine he’s holding. 

“Fuck,” Eddie says frantically, and stands there doing fucking nothing like a spider with a human head is attacking again. “Oh god, I’m sorry—“ 

“It’s fine,” Richie says, ignoring the shattered glass and wine seeping into the time floor in favor of attempting to look casual and normal, which he fails at completely, and then Steve appears in the doorway of the kitchen and his eyebrows instantly shoot half a foot into the air. 

“Hello,” he says, to Eddie, who looks absolutely petrified. “What the hell?” 

Richie remembers about paper towels and rips a handful of them from the roll on the counter, decides it would be too humiliating to actually get down on his knees right now, and instead just sort of throws them over the spill. “Hey,” he ventures. “Steve, this is my friend Eddie Kaspbrak from Derry. Eddie, Steve.” 

“Hi,” says Eddie, and actually does a little wave, which does not at all help with the overwhelming feeling that they’ve gotten caught doing something they shouldn’t be. 

Which, Richie reminds himself, they were not. This situation literally could not be more innocent, except that, for no good reason at all, he hasn’t mentioned it to Steve. 

“Eddie’s just visiting for a few days,” Richie says, lamely, and adds, “Sorry I haven’t been checking my phone.” 

“Richie,” Steve says, “a moment?” 

He doesn’t want to leave Eddie by himself, because this is exactly the kind of situation where Eddie is going to freak out and start overthinking shit, but Eddie gives him a little glare over Steve’s shoulder and jerks his head toward the doorway, so he goes. 

“What is your problem?” Steve says, quietly enough that Eddie hopefully can’t hear it. “It would be so much less bad if you had just told me you were fucking this guy, Richie. I mean, the lying is so much worse.” 

“I’m not.” It sounds like a lie. “He’s my friend, okay, he’s getting divorced and he needed some company. That’s really all it is.” 

Steve looks tired. He looks exhausted by all of it, and Richie can’t blame him. “Okay, sure,” he says. “And what about the rest of it? What about literally everything that’s happened since you went to Maine?” 

“I’m trying to be a better person, you know,” Richie says. “I’m actually trying to get better for a fucking change and you act like it’s some personal insult.” 

Steve sighs. “Well, maybe it hurts a little that you never tried to be a better person for me.” 

And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it. That’s the absolute truth. 

“I’m sorry.” He really is. He really doesn’t mean to do this, to just go another stumbling through life and hurting people, but it’s what he does. It’s how he is. 

“I don’t think I can do this,” Steve says. “I want you to be okay, Rich, I do, but I can’t be responsible for that.” 

Richie hangs his head, stares down at the floor. “Yeah,” he says. “I get that.” 

After the door closes behind him, Richie leans against the wall for a moment and doesn’t cry. He almost wishes he would — that’s the reaction that would be appropriate — but he really just feels like a failure. 

Back in the kitchen, Eddie has already cleaned up the spilled wine and broken glass and is clearly in the process of freaking out, because he’s scrubbing a pan Richie’s pretty sure they weren’t even using. 

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry about that.” 

Eddie’s eyes flicker up to him and then back to the sponge he’s holding, and his gaze stays fixed on that. “Is everything okay?” he says hesitantly. 

_I’m in love with you_, Richie thinks. _Eddie, you’re going to laugh because this is so hilariously stupid you wouldn’t believe even I could come up with it, but I love you. Turns out that even if you don’t look at it for twenty years, it doesn’t go away_. 

“It will be.” 

“Did he think we were—“ Eddie gestures vaguely. He looks like the idea is deeply disturbing. 

“He’s just pissed that I didn’t tell him someone was visiting.” Richie retrieves a second bottle of wine. 

“I can go,” Eddie says quietly. “I’ll just get a hotel and book a flight for tomorrow, I—“ 

“No.” To head this off at the pass, he pulls two glasses out of the cabinet and pours them both wine. “Don’t, this isn’t — I want you to stay.” 

Eddie relents, washes the soap off of his hands. “Alright, alright,” he says. “Just… maybe buy him flowers or something.” 

Richie snorts. “I’ll do that, Eds, thank you.” 

They eat dinner mostly in silence. It’s incredibly awkward, and the stifling guilt makes it hard to swallow. If he were anything approaching a rational person with his priorities in order, he would’ve gone chasing after Steve, the person who’s been there for him while Eddie wasn’t even a memory. The person who actually wanted him, and he remembers how that felt, the first time, to for once in his life be wanted. 

“Can I get a review of my cooking, or what,” Eddie says abruptly. 

Richie smiles. “It’s excellent. You’ve really outdone yourself, Felix.” 

Eddie scowls, but he has that look in his eyes that says he’s not serious about it. “How many more of those movies are there?” he says.

“Oh, there are five more,” Richie says, and grins in spite of himself. “And now that you’ve brought it up, we’re watching all of them.” 

—  
In the end Eddie stays in Los Angeles for four days. It’s as long as he can stand. 

They watch all of the stupid X-Men movies and sit together on Richie’s couch, closer together than they should. They throw kernels of popcorn at each other like children and talk about the last twenty years of their lives — Eddie does, eventually, tell the story about his honeymoon, and Richie roars with laughter like he knew he would and says Eddie should go on tour with him as his opening act. 

When Richie drops him off at LAX, Eddie leans over to the driver’s side of his stupid midlife crisis sports car to give him a one-armed hug goodbye and is vividly reminded of leaving the circle after their blood oath, of instinctively reaching out for Richie — just for him. He never used to think about it back then, the way he thinks about everything now. 

Back in New York, he gets a hotel room. He’s determined not to panic about Bowers this time, which of course he does the first night, but it’s not so bad after that. After he makes it through one night and nothing happens. 

He starts calling around about available apartments and this is an immediate problem to deal with, but there’s a much bigger one lurking on the horizon. He thinks he doesn’t want to avoid looking at it anymore. 

Eddie thinks of the leper back in Derry. He thinks of the book Stan gave him before he left Atlanta, which was about recovering from the effects of unhealthy parental control and which Stan said had helped him, with his father. He thinks of how his fears of disease have never settled on one particular thing — it’s never been cancer or pneumonia or Alzheimer’s Disease, it’s always just been this feeling that he is already sick with something unnameable and nothing he does will prevent it from killing him eventually. 

He used to worry about this — he used to worry about it a _lot_. But then he met Myra and it was reassuring because everything about it was… tolerable. It was all familiar and fine and normal. 

But. Jesus Christ, he thinks, life isn’t supposed to be about what you can _tolerate_. 

Eddie can’t really get his mind around the full scope of it without feeling panicky and short of breath. He can’t really picture himself, even when he tries, with some generic man he might meet in New York; he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to notice some stranger, in that way, without feeling guilty. 

But. He can think about Richie saying _there is nothing wrong with you_, and the words weren’t meant for him but he took a little of them for himself, selfishly, because that way he can believe it.

He can think about Richie, who is brave enough to say it and who, despite everything about him, is horribly attractive in an undefinable way. He’s got that jawline. He’s got four inches of height on Eddie that Eddie is starting to suspect he might… not hate. God. 

They sat about three feet apart for hours and Eddie thinks it would have been easy to just slide across the couch and _do_ something about it. Kiss him, curl his fingers into Richie’s hair and keep him there. He wanted, he wanted… 

He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and he makes himself stare his reflection in the eye and think about it. It’s strange — he already looks different, angry still-healing scar across his face. Eddie doesn’t hate the scar. He gets a lot of weird looks from clients at work, but there’s something almost reassuring about having a physical manifestation of how much he’s changed. 

He keeps searching his face like there’s going to be something else, though. Being stabbed is almost a minor thing compared to the fact that he’s probably in love with Richie. 

It’s almost easier to admit to himself that he loves Richie than that he wants him, because he loves all six of them but not — not like this. Not in the selfish, sharp, half-painful way that he loves Richie. 

He realizes it actually makes him happy, to think it. It makes him so happy he laughs out loud, a little deliriously, because it’s not a good thing, objectively speaking. Richie’s not waiting around for Eddie to get it together and figure out what he wants. Richie’s got someone else. 

_He didn’t go after him, though_, Eddie thinks. _He stayed with me_. 

It’s not a good train of thought, but he lets himself have it. _I knew him before anybody was laughing at his stupid jokes, we killed an immortal evil clown together — twice — and I think he wants me, too. Or I think at least he used to. So that’s not nothing_. 

He smiles at himself a little maniacally in the mirror, and he thinks of little thirteen-year-old Eddie Kaspbrak, that projection Pennywise had created staring up at his own face and then at Richie’s, and he thinks he understands now what they meant. _Things are going to be different from now on_, he thinks in the direction of that kid. _We’re going to be okay._

—   
Richie’s life now pretty much consists entirely of writing and of doing other things while telling himself he should be writing. 

Comedy is mostly editing. This is something he learned early on in his career. Ninety percent of the Richie Tozier creative process has been learning not to say the first idiotic thing that comes into his head, learning to recognize that most of the things he thinks of are not funny, but if he only says about one of every ten things, people will never know about the other nine. The editing process is extensive, which is why it’s fine that his new material isn’t ready yet. 

He meets Steve in a coffee shop, neutral ground, for the customary exchange of belongings. He gets back a box set of _Frasier_ DVDs he’s been looking for for six months and feels so much guilt as he’s sitting there drinking a latte that he thinks it might crush him. 

“I really am sorry,” he says eventually, “for being, I mean, you know how I am.” 

Steve smiles, in a way that looks more genuine than Richie was expecting. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m sorry you’re like that too,” and Richie can’t help but laugh.

They could be friends, he thinks, in the not-too-distant future. Although he’s definitely going to have to find a new tour manager. 

He talks to Stan and Bill, who both tell him about the benefits of therapy. He talks to Mike about the best place to get sushi in Seattle and to Bev about how much they both hate the stuff about the election they’re doing on SNL. 

Once, he calls Ben and says, “Can I ask you a weird personal question?” and before Ben can say no barrels through with, “Did you ever love anyone except Beverly?” 

He’s pretty drunk when he says this, and Ben’s answering long moment of silence makes him want to hang up, until he says, “I mean, not in the same way. I probably could have, though, if I had been more — open to it, I guess?” He sighs. “Richie… I know everything worked out pretty well for me but it wasn’t good, you know, to be alone for that long. It wasn’t romantic.” 

“‘S pretty romantic,” Richie mumbles. “You got the girl, right, so it’s all good.” 

“I got really lucky,” Ben says, and it just sucks. It sucks, because he knows what Ben means, which is that you could love someone else if you really worked at it, but you never actually do the work, because you know in some other life you can’t remember it was once so easy you couldn’t stop if you tried.

“Alright,” he says. “Thanks, Benny. Don’t tell your girlfriend about our late-night phone calls.” 

He resolves that he’s not going to call Eddie, but Eddie does call, apparently in search of someone to talk to about all his opinions on the comic book movies he’s watching for the first time. His opinions are mostly that they suck and he hates Richie for getting him to start watching them. 

He pictures Eddie alone in his New York apartment, trying to map the memories of those few days together onto all their conversations. He knows what Eddie looks like first thing in the morning, his hair sticking up in a hundred different directions. He knows how he looks late at night, when the hand gestures that always punctuate his sentences get more frequent and careless. He knows Eddie doesn’t wear his wedding ring anymore; this is always a detail Richie fills in in his mental images, with slightly guilty satisfaction. 

They don’t talk about Eddie’s divorce, and Eddie hasn’t asked about Steve. They don’t talk about Derry, either, except in passing recollection of childhood memories; Richie doesn’t mention his dreams. 

In late October, Ben sends out an email inviting everyone to spend Christmas (_and Hanukkah_! he adds in a jaunty aside) at his cabin in Wyoming. 

Of course he has a cabin in Wyoming. Richie’s net worth is probably on par with Ben’s, even though his job is at least twice as useless, but at least he’s not ostentatious about it. 

_Significant others invited (that means you, Richie!)_ the invitation says, an addition that is almost certainly from Beverly. He never told her or Ben they aren’t together anymore; he hasn’t told anyone. 

_Unfair_, he thinks, and for a moment he considers saying he can’t make it. They’re his favorite people in the world, the six of them, but honestly after the past few months the idea of being around all of them seems strange. He slid so easily back into his old patterns; they’ll probably all know it, and secretly judge him behind their smiling, beautiful faces. 

He’s jealous of them, a little. Of course he is. He’s jealous of Ben and Beverly’s new inseparability and of the way Stan talks about his wife like she personally put the red-winged blackbirds in the sky just for him and even of Bill and Mike, who can touch each other so easily and say “I love you” and never worry that it’ll be taken the wrong way. Always was jealous of Bill, who had so much charisma despite his stutter, who effortlessly commanded the respect and attention Richie was trying so hard for. 

He loves them, but it would be easier not to go. 

Except, of course, he scrolls down and there’s Eddie’s reply from his work email, signature on the end that says _Edward Kaspbrak, Risk Analyst._ “I’ll be there,” it says, and that’s all. 

And Richie’s nothing if not predictable. 

_Looks like it’ll just be me, but I’ll be there too_, he replies. 

—  
Eddie still has notifications turned on for Richie’s tweets — he has the app for this exclusive purpose, because reading anything else on it makes him feel like he’s going slowly insane — so he sees the video as soon as Richie posts it. 

_I didn’t get permission from my publicist to do this set or to post it on Twitter so please reply to this and say you don’t hate it! Thanks!_ Richie has written. 

It’s a slightly blurry video clip from some L.A. comedy club, clearly starting in the middle of a set, and Richie has a death grip on the microphone stand and is blinking nervously behind his most enormous pair of glasses. 

“The worst part about telling people you’re gay,” Richie says on the screen, “is all the emails from your ex-girlfriends. Got emails from more women than I even remembered dating. They hear it through the grapevine and they get in touch right away. And they all say the same thing about how happy they are for you. Bullshit. They’re happy for themselves. They’re all thinking, ‘Oh, thank God, he was gay the whole time. There was nothing I could have done.’” 

He paused for a chorus of audience laughter, with a slightly crazed grin. “They’re thinking they can revise their memory of dating this asshole who was stoned all the time and not even good at sex and instead of a bad choice they made, it’s like, tragic, because I was gay the whole time. But I’m not letting them off the hook that easily. They still made that choice. I wanna be a permanent black mark on all of their records.” 

It’s kind of stunning, Eddie thinks, that he can say this out loud and sound casual, sound light and joking, even though someone who knows Richie as well as he does can read the fear in his body language. He thinks, sentimentally, that Richie might be the bravest person he knows.

“The second worst thing,” Richie continues, “is that I’m fucking forty years old, so all the halfway decent guys my age are taken. The only options I have are these twenty-six year-olds with nose piercings. And I know you’re thinking, who doesn’t want to bang a twenty-six-year-old with a nose piercing? But I’m just too old for that shit.” Richie sighs dramatically. “I would kill to be a boring married guy already. It’s all I want. The only thing that turns me on anymore is seeing a man wearing khakis and a baseball hat asking to speak to a manager at T.G.I. Friday’s. I hang around under the flatscreen TVs just hoping one of ‘em will notice me.” 

Eddie pauses the video. 

He thinks, _wait, does that mean — no, it’s probably just for the bit. He’s joking. He would have said something_. 

But maybe he wouldn’t? It’s not like Richie has mentioned anything about Steve recently. It’s not like Eddie, who didn’t tell Richie for over a month that he was getting divorced, has any room to talk. 

Eddie deliberately does not think _I’ve asked to speak to a manager at T.G.I. Friday’s_, because this is not actually a desirable quality, and it was one time. 

He looks at the replies to the tweet, which are mostly supportive, despite some replies along the lines of “wtf is this for real?”, a few strings of random letters — he doesn’t know if that’s positive or negative — and one person who says “straight people can have Richie Tozier I didn’t ask for this,” which does make him laugh a little. 

_Saw your new material_, he texts Richie, _way better than the old shit_, and then calls Stanley. 

“Do you think I should tell him?” he blurts out after the perfunctory hellos and how-are-yous. 

“Tell who what?”

“Goddamnit, Stan. Tell Richie.” 

“Are you kidding?” Stan says, disbelievingly. “Of course I think you should tell him.” 

Eddie had kind of expected Stan to talk him out of it. That was how the dynamics of their friendship had once worked — he would be on board with some stupid idea, and then Stan would point out that it was dangerous or disgusting and Eddie would immediately remember a dozen reasons why he was right and switch sides. But Stan’s different now; they all are. 

“You don’t think it would be…” He pauses, unable to think of the right word for it. “Weird?” 

“I think all of our friendships can survive a little weird,” Stan says. “But, you know, you have to put yourself out there for—“

“If you say ‘for the universe to give you good things—‘“ 

“For the universe to— okay, sorry.” He can practically hear Stan grinning at him. 

“Maybe when we see each other at Ben’s,” he says, reluctantly. “I’m not planning anything. We’ll see how it feels in the moment.” 

“Spontaneity,” Stan says, in the serious tone of those who have tried out the concept and found it not to their taste. “That could be good.” 

It could be, Eddie thinks. There is a possibility, however faint, that it could actually be good. 

—  
They all make it out to Wyoming. It’s the first time they’ve all been together since Derry, and there’s something a little strange about that — weird things happen when they’re all together, historically. But the addition of two extra people and a fuckton of tinsel renders it all wonderfully mundane. 

Stan’s there with Patty, Bill’s there with Audra — who, understandably, looks a little suspicious of all of them and also looks a little like Beverly — Mike’s there with a suitcase full of souvenirs from various beaches and didn’t pack one single coat. Eddie’s the last of them to get there and launches into a tirade about Delta Airlines as soon as he gets through the door, and for a moment Richie’s heart practically aches with happiness. 

Ben’s cabin in Wyoming reminds Richie, oddly, of his childhood home during the holidays, back when both of his parents were still alive. It’s covered in Christmas decorations, ranging from minimalist silver trees to tacky stuffed reindeer, with just a few touches of Hanukkah thrown in. 

When they were kids, he and Bill and Eddie used to race outside their respective homes as soon as they could the morning of December 26th to compare presents they’d received from their grandparents. Bill always got the best shit; Eddie always got sweaters, and Richie and Stan would complain about how no one ever actually got them eight presents for all eight nights. 

Just like when they were kids, Stanley is currently lecturing them about how Hanukkah is not actually a significant holiday on the Jewish calendar, it’s just a marketing ploy to make Christians feel better about their cultural dominance, and Richie isn’t allowed to have an opinion on it. 

“I’m just as Jewish as you, Stanley!” Richie says, just like he always used to back then. 

“You literally are not, it’s only on your dad’s side and you barely came to temple when we were kids. You didn’t even have a bar mitzvah!” 

“I could have since then,” Richie says. “I could’ve become deeply religious and you could be really disrespecting my spiritual and cultural identification right now.” 

Stan raises an eyebrow. “Well, you didn’t, so I’m not.” 

“Okay, but culturally—“ 

“I don’t want you as part of the Jewish comedic tradition,” Stan says, laughing. “You’re embarrassing us.” 

“I think you’re being a bit of a gatekeeper, Stanley,” says Patty, and Richie decides that he definitely likes her. 

Richie looks around, taking in the fact that they’re all in one place together, somewhere outside of Derry, for the first time. He does his customary headcount to make sure none of them have been separated from the group by unexpected supernatural dangers, and he comes up one short. Stan’s next to him, Mike’s in the kitchen complimenting Audra on her gingerbread recipe while Bill looks delighted that they’re getting along, Ben’s trying to convince Eddie that cliff-diving is “perfectly safe.” They’re one short. 

He finds Beverly outside, leaning against her car and smoking a cigarette. 

“Hey, Marsh,” he says. “You know those things are bad for you, right?” 

She startles, but only for a moment. “Hey, Tozier. You want one?” 

He shakes his head. “I’m good. Just checking on you.” 

She snorts. “Oh, thank you.” He watches as she takes a long drag of the cigarette and exhales, closing her eyes. “Don’t tell Ben I still smoke,” she says after a moment. “I don’t, usually. I quit in college, it’s just sometimes — when I’m stressed out.” 

“What’re you stressed about? If you want to tell me,” he adds, because he knows he’s not great at the sincere emotional stuff and he’d always been kind of a dick to Beverly in particular, back then. 

Beverly sighs. She looks like she’s going to say nothing for a moment, and then the words come quick and nervous. “It’s just that I used to have these big Christmas parties with Tom. We’d always host, and his whole family came, and all of our friends, but none of it was — genuine. It was a way for us to show off how much money we had and how in love we were. And I don’t ever want it to be like that with Ben.” 

“Well, we’re not a bunch of Project Runway dickheads you have to impress. We’re your actual friends.” 

Bev smiles. “I know. It’s — Ben says he loves me all the time, you know, and I haven’t said it back. Which he says is fine, and he doesn’t want me to before I’m ready, but it’s like — I think in the beginning I wanted to be with him because it was easy, or safe, but now — I don’t even know what real love feels like, the good kind.” She looks like saying this is painful. “And I still feel like I don’t deserve it, or I can’t ever love him as much as he loves me, or…” She trails off, shaking her head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I’m sorry.” 

“Hey.” He bumps his shoulder lightly against hers. “It’s okay. It’s probably because you know better than to care what I think of you.” She smiles, a little. “But for the record I think you deserve every good thing in the world, and Ben is not the type of guy to go around calculating who loves who more, ‘cause that’s not really how love works. So you should just tell him how you feel.” Richie shrugs, and tries to cover the moment of earnestness by saying, “Though, for the record, if you break up I’m taking Ben’s side, because if he wants to have a rebound fling I’m going to be there.” 

She laughs, genuine if a little watery, and Richie’s heart squeezes with fondness for her. “Also,” he adds before he can think better of it, “I’m sorry we weren’t better friends when we were kids. I was an asshole to you, because I didn’t want some girl to mess up the little Lost Boys thing we had going, but that was stupid. You’re a good guy, Marsh.” 

“Thank you, Richie,” she says, and flicks a little bit of cigarette ash at him. “It’s an honor.” 

They stand there quietly for a few moments while Bev finishes her cigarette, and then she says, “You didn’t bring the boyfriend.” 

“Ugh.” Richie pulls a face and sticks his hands into his jacket pockets. “That’s over.” 

Bev frowns. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” 

“I don’t know. It’s my fault.” 

“I’m sure it’s not completely your fault.” 

“Like, eighty-nine percent,” Richie says, and then, because fuck it, she probably knows anyway, “I’m the one who came back from Derry fuckin’ hung up on someone else.” 

“Oh,” says Beverly, her eyes widening, but she recovers quickly. “I didn’t know it was that serious between you and Ben.” 

“Oh, yeah, laugh at my pain,” Richie says, grinning. “That’s my job, you know.” 

She smiles at him, leaning slightly into his side. “You should tell Eddie,” she says. “No matter what happens, you’ll feel better if you say it.” 

He’s not going to tell Eddie, but he says, “I’ll think about it,” and they walk back into the cabin together. 

—  
On Christmas Eve, half of the group goes into town in Ben’s car to look at some local light display Ben is enthusing about. Mike, Stan and Richie announce that they’re staying behind to watch some football game that’s apparently important, so that’s what Eddie does too. 

He’s probably not being very subtle; he’s been pretty much orbiting Richie since they got here, but he used to do that when they were kids too and no one ever thought it meant anything. Even Eddie didn’t think it meant anything. It’s kind of weirdly thrilling, now, to watch Richie do stupid things like fake-swordfight Bev with candy canes and let himself think of him with conscious fondness, to even let himself look. 

“How’ve you been doing in New York, Eddie?” Mike asks him as a commercial for fabric softener plays in the background. 

Eddie feels his shoulders tense into a defense posture as they do every time someone asks him how he’s doing, but he reminds himself that his friends aren’t looking for weaknesses when they ask questions like that — they just genuinely want to know. 

“It’s alright,” he says. “I got my own place. Obviously sort of a readjustment, but… I’m okay. I’m better than I thought I would be honestly.” Stan catches his eye and smiles. “What about you, Mike, staying in Florida?” 

Mike shakes his head sadly. “Hell no,” he says. “Do you have any idea how many confederate flags and MAGA hats there are in Florida? I don’t want to find out how bad it’ll be after the inauguration.” 

There’s a moment of silence where Eddie can tell they’re all thinking about the election results and about how bad things could get all over the country, and Richie says, “Maybe we should all move to Canada.” 

“Pretty sure they have racism in Canada too,” Stan says. 

“Yeah, well, you volunteered to live in Georgia, what the fuck do you know.” Richie has his feet up on the coffee table, which looks like Ben might’ve made it with his own hands. He smirks, glancing over at Eddie as he takes a long drink from his bottle of beer; their eyes meet for a half-second, and Eddie smiles to himself.

Stan looks solemn, though. “Georgia’s not really better or worse than anywhere else. There’s prejudice everywhere and there’s community everywhere, you know, you just have to look for it.” 

“Can you stop being so emotionally healthy for one minute?” Richie turns back to Mike. “Canada’s gonna be the best option until California declares our independence from the rest of this bullshit country, that’s all I’m saying.” 

“Well, maybe I’ll check out Canada.” Mike grins, but the smile falters after a moment. 

“There’s always New York,” Eddie offers. He can see Mike picking absently at the label on his own beer bottle, unraveling it into little nervous strips. 

“Your city invented Trump,” Richie says, waving an accusatory finger at him. “You literally inflicted him on the rest of us because New York didn’t do anything about that guy.” 

This is actually not unfair, especially considering the part of New York City society Eddie associates with. He knows his coworkers, his friends as far as he has them, mostly vote Republican on the basis of their tax bills. What an absurdly privileged little world he’s lived in, he thinks. 

“You know,” Mike says, “I know this doesn’t make sense, but I stayed in Derry so long I thought it was, I don’t know, the worst place in the world. I thought after we, you know, killed it, everything would be different. But the world isn’t different. People are… people are pretty much the same.”

A horrible, paranoid thought comes unbidden into Eddie’s mind, and of course he has to say it out loud. “Do you think there are other ones out there?” he says. “I mean… other things like it, out there feeding on other people’s fear or racism or whatever.” 

“I’ve looked into it,” Mike admits. “It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just urban legend, outside of Derry. That’s nowhere else where people die like they do in that town, though. That’s unique.” 

“If there are other ones we should get a government grant to do something about them,” Richie says. “We’re experts at this point.” 

Eddie shudders. “Fuck no,” he says. “Never again.” He doesn’t know why it’s never occurred to him before, that there might be others. That what had happened to them disproved, really, everything he’d thought about the world in the years he’d spent away from Derry. 

The others look affected by it, too, he thinks. Richie crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head, like he’s warding off the idea. 

“My theory is, Pennywise was like, a thing Derry created,” he says. “Sheer concentrated power of that town being evil, manifesting in clown form.” 

“Pennywise was there before Derry,” Mike says. “It was probably there before people.” 

“Why are we talking about this?” Stan says sharply. “We won, we get to go on with our lives now. It doesn’t matter where it came from.” There’s some of the old anxiety in his face, and Eddie thinks that maybe Stan is not as alright as he tries to be, not all the time. 

“Hey—“ he starts to say, but then there’s the sound of the door opening behind them. 

“Who wants hot chocolate?” Ben’s voice is calling, and it’s suddenly a million miles away again, that place underneath Derry and the things that happened to them there. 

Eddie catches Stan’s eye as they all get to their feet. Stan gives him a little shrug that says hey, what can you do? 

It’s far away, even now. It’ll get further. 

—  
It’s three a.m., the early morning hours of December 25, and Richie can’t sleep. 

He had the nightmare again, the one where Eddie’s blood is all over his hands and he knows Eddie’s dead but he’s still fighting with all the strength in his body to stay there, with him. Sometimes he wakes up and he’s weirdly mad at the deadlights-versions of their friends for not just letting him die, because when it was happening — when he thought it was happening — it really felt like the only option. 

Suddenly he can’t stand being alone in the dark anymore, not when this whole fucking house is full of people, so he gets up and walks out into the living room in the vague hope that someone else might be out there experiencing a fit of angst or late-night drinking. 

He finds Eddie sitting in the living room by himself, squinting at something on his phone screen with a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream by his side, and Richie feels like maybe on some level he knew he’d be there. 

“Hey,” Richie says. “Trouble sleeping, or were you just waiting up to hear the reindeer on the roof?” 

Eddie looks up at him, eyes widening in surprise. “Uh,” he says. “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep… Merry Christmas.” 

“Happy holidays,” Richie says. He retrieves a glass from behind Ben’s bar that he has just off the living room like some kind of open-concept madman, pours himself some of the Baileys without asking, and throws himself into the armchair across from where Eddie’s sitting curled into the side of the couch. 

“Did you notice that Bill’s wife totally looks like Bev?” Richie says without preamble. 

Eddie looks like he’s trying to hold back a laugh. “Fuck off, do not let Audra hear you say that. The divorce rate in this group is already high enough.” 

It’s almost funny how obvious they all are, Richie thinks. It’s not like his own type is any less transparent than Bill’s. Childhood impressions, and all that. 

“You’ve been running statistics on us, haven’t you,” he says. “Do you have a spreadsheet? Does it have a column for what ages we’re all going to die?” 

“Yeah, but it’s weird, yours says forty?” Eddie says, with that perfect comedic timing. Richie laughs, and the silence that falls between them is almost comfortable. 

“How are you, like, doing?” Eddie asks. “We never talk about that.” 

“Better, mostly,” Richie says, and then pauses. It’s quiet, and it’s dark, and it’s the time of night for confessions. “Well,” he says. “Can I say something fucked up?” 

He can practically hear Eddie roll his eyes. “What else would you say?” 

“I don’t feel bad about killing Bowers,” Richie says in a rush, before he can hesitate and then not say it at all. “I mean, I feel bad about it, because I didn’t like doing it and I wish I hadn’t had to, but not, like. Guilty.” 

“I — you don’t have to feel bad about that,” Eddie says, sounding confused. “He would’ve killed Mike if you hadn’t been there.” 

Richie sighs. “Yeah, but… I don’t know, he had a fucked-up childhood, and Pennywise was influencing him, or whatever…” 

“Bowers was a sociopathic little creep before Pennywise did anything to him. And also, _we_ had fucked-up childhoods, and so did all of our friends, and we turned out fine.” 

Eddie’s eyes are bright with conviction, and that’s the thing about him, when he’s convinced of something he’s really convinced. It’s impossible to talk him out of anything, so Richie won’t try to talk him into believing he’s an unrepentant murderer. 

“Thanks,” he says, and Eddie nods. There’s a long moment of silence, which Richie fills by drinking more, and Eddie is drumming his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. 

“Can I say something fucked up, actually?” Eddie says. 

Richie leans over and refills Eddie’s empty glass, which he accepts gratefully. “Yeah, of course.” 

“Sometimes I think Adrian Mellon died because of me.” 

That brings Richie up short. “What?” 

“I mean — the asthma,” Eddie says. His voice sounds a little ragged, a little strange. He’s looking not at Richie but at a fixed point over his shoulder and a few feet to the left. “Don’t you think it’s possible that, that it came back and saw this guy getting punched in the face and reaching for his inhaler and thought, ‘oh, there’s Eddie Kaspbrak. I always wanted to kill that kid.’” 

“He didn’t die because of you,” Richie says sharply. “Pennywise didn’t make those kids fucking... assault some couple for having the audacity to be gay in Derry. That’s just people, man. Just regular, ordinary hate. Clown didn’t cause that, it was just there to take advantage.” 

He doesn’t know if that’s true, exactly — it’s a chicken-or-egg situation, no matter what Mike says — but he’s not letting those kids who beat Adrian half to death off the hook that easily. Eddie’s right, it wasn’t just Pennywise; there were good people in Derry too, people like his parents who were just doing their best. They all made choices about what kind of people to be. 

“Rich?” Eddie’s voice is soft, tentative, and Richie swallows hard. 

“Yeah?” 

“I’m really sorry you had to… be there, after that happened, I guess. It must’ve been…” He trails off. 

Richie thinks of the photo that was printed alongside Adrian Mellon’s obituary in the _Derry Evening Herald_; they gave him a full-color photo, at least, not one that was black and white and a little smudged like on a missing poster. And then his story was national news, the first Derry murder to make it out of the town’s boundaries since maybe ever, and the photo was everywhere. Adrian was smiling and he looked younger than his thirty years. He looked like someone who wasn’t afraid or ashamed of anything, and it was so unfair that Derry got its claws into even people like that. 

_In lieu of flowers, please send donations of EqualityMaine_, the obituary said, and Richie sent them a check that could never be big enough to make up for Adrian, for not having killed the thing that killed him the first time around or for the fact that he was never the kind of brave Adrian was.

“Yeah. Not great. I mean, I always thought that place would kill me someday. If I stayed.” He doesn’t plan for it to come out sounding as sincere as it does. 

He wonders if Eddie’s remembering how desperately he wanted to stay anyway. He was sixteen and Derry was the whole world, and it wasn’t safe but it had Eddie in it, which was enough. 

“Can I ask you something?” Eddie says. “You can say no, or you don’t have to answer, it’s a dumb question.” 

_Truth or dare_, a distant voice in Richie’s head says, but he doesn’t listen to it. “Hit me.” 

“How did you — um. How did you know?” 

He’s really not making eye contact now, in a very focused way, staring down at his hands around his glass. Richie doesn’t have to ask what Eddie means. 

“Matthew Broaderick,” he says, and Eddie snorts quietly. “No, I mean, I just kind of — knew. Some people say they knew when they were like, three, and I didn’t, but I definitely figured it out by the time I was twelve. Took me a few years to realize I wasn’t just going to start liking girls too, and then I left Derry and kinda forgot about that part and gave it a few more shots.” He gives a mock toast to the empty air. “Thank you to the closeted lesbians I dated in college.” 

When Eddie replies, his voice is tight with suppressed tension. “Do you think someone could just — not know?” 

Richie squints at him in the darkness, and Eddie‘s eyes are closed, Eddie is clutching his glass with a hand that looks like it might be shaking slightly.

“Or at least try so hard not to think about it,” Eddie continues, “that they don’t see it clearly until they’re — you know. Middle-aged.” He laughs hollowly, still not looking over at Richie. 

“Uh,” Richie says, helpfully. 

It’s — it’s not a total surprise, not really. He’s always kind of thought, maybe, in a way he told himself was wishful thinking. But it’s also, at the same time, very hard information to process. 

“I know,” Eddie says. “Pretty pathetic. But I think I — yeah.” 

Oh fuck, Richie thinks, and his heart does a kind of sick giddy flip for a second, and then he realizes Eddie’s hands are still shaking and he’s just hit with this wave of terrible sadness for him. He thinks of Eddie spending all those years isolating himself, living with that denial and all-too-familiar shame, and then he’s just fucking _angry_. He should have been there, he thinks, they should have had least had the chance to go through all of it together. 

“Okay, first of all,” Richie says, “and pay attention, man, this is how you react when someone discloses personal, meaningful information to you, instead of asking if they’re joking — thank you for telling me.” 

“Sure,” Eddie says, and laughs a little hysterically. “I mean — who else.” 

He looks lost, sitting alone in the darkness across a distance that seems suddenly much too vast, so Richie sets down the bottle of Baileys and crosses over to sit next to him. He doesn’t reach out to touch him, but he wants to be there, in case. 

“It’s not pathetic,” he says. “I know it sucks to deal with, it’s hard, but it’s not pathetic.”

“Pennywise used to always ask me what I was looking for,” Eddie says, a little breathlessly. “When we were kids and then later, when we went back, and I never knew what it meant but I think it was about this. Maybe I could never get it until I went back to Derry. I don’t know.” He sighs. “I just feel like everything’s different now and I still can’t just, say it.”

“Look,” Richie says, “not to sound like a YouTube video for middle schoolers, but it’s going to be so much easier to say it the second time. Starts to feel totally normal eventually, and before you know it all you want to do is tell the cashier at Trader Joe’s that you’re gay.”

Eddie hasn’t said the word yet, he realizes, but he doesn’t object to it when Richie does. He smiles distantly and nods, a little, like he’s trying to convince himself. 

Silence falls between them again after that and Eddie finishes the rest of his drink. “Fuck,” he mumbles, mostly to himself, and without fully thinking about it Richie reaches across the last few inches of distance and tries to pat him on the knee, which is maybe an imitation of a comforting gesture he once saw somewhere. Eddie catches his hand and Richie doesn’t breathe for a moment, thinking he’s about to throw it off, but Eddie just keeps it there. 

“One more question,” Eddie says softly. “Why didn’t you bring Steve?” 

_Fuck_. This is the moment, then, where he has to say it all out loud. 

“We’re not together anymore.” 

“Why?” Richie desperately wishes he were better at understanding Eddie’s tone of voice, wishes he could read into that single word volumes of meaning. 

“Well, after everything we went through in Derry, I realized I needed to be with someone who was willing to roleplay as a cannibal clown.” 

“Jesus, Richie, I’m trying to have a real fucking conversation,” Eddie snaps. They’re still basically holding hands, or something like it, Eddie’s hand holding his down. 

“Come on, Eds,” he says. “I think you know.” 

Eddie stares at him, eyes wide and bright, for a long moment. “You…” he starts to say, and he pulls his hand away abruptly. Richie watches as Eddie starts to reach for him again and then seems to think better of it, curling his hand into a fist instead.

“Yeah,” Richie says, figuring it’s all or nothing now. This whole series of events is so surreal that he’s never even imagined it happening, not once, and it’s so unfair that he has to do the whole thing as _improv_. “I mean, I’m talking about you, to be clear, it was because of you.” 

Eddie looks him straight in the face for the first time in what feels like a fucking eternity. “Oh,” he says. “Um, can you — can you kiss me.” 

His eyes are so wide and earnest and Richie’s heart is in his throat. He definitely can’t do that, actually, because he can’t move or even really think.

“Eddie,” he says, voice so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “I think you’re in kind of an emotionally fragile place right now, so if you — I’m gonna need you to take the initiative here, I’m sorry.” 

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Eddie says, sincerely, and kisses him.

It’s a brief, clumsy kiss, and it’s fucking incredible. Eddie pulls back after just a moment and raises his eyebrows at Richie like a challenge, so the only right thing to do is accept it and kiss him again in a way that makes it clear he’s fucking serious about it. It feels like a minor miracle that Eddie responds in kind, reaching for him now and pulling at the fabric of his t-shirt, digging his fingers in. 

“I was so fucking jealous,” Eddie says, but it’s almost more of a snarl. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about you, and him, and you called him cute and I wanted — I was so furious that you were saying that about someone who wasn’t me.” 

The words wash over Richie like they can’t possibly be real, because Eddie thinking about him that way is so insane and thrilling and because he can’t stand the idea that anything he did hurt Eddie even for a minute. 

“I will say it about you any time you want,” he says. “That’s a promise.” 

“God,” Eddie says, “god, fuck,” and kisses him again. He’s still all tense and serious about it, and it’s bizarre that this is happening at all, let alone on what is technically Christmas morning in rural Wyoming, and Richie’s heart might not be able to take this. 

When he pulls back again Eddie has this wrinkle of worry in between his eyebrows and Richie presses his thumb to it, which makes Eddie frown harder. He kisses him on the nose, which is more effective in smoothing that wrinkle out. 

“Hey,” Richie says. “You remember that time, we were like twelve, and I told you I was going to climb that tree over on Terrace Street and you kept saying I was going to fall and split my head open and die?” 

“Maybe vaguely,” Eddie says. “You did a lot of dumb shit like that.” 

“Yeah, well, I remember because that almost did happen. This branch snapped and I fell really hard and brained my head on a rock. And you ran over right away and called me an idiot and said I was too stupid to live but you were, you know, kneeling over me and you had your whole first aid kit with you and you cleaned off the cut like, really carefully.” He’s aware of how weird this whole story sounds, now, decades in the future, but Eddie’s eyes are wide and bright and he keeps talking. “And I thought it was totally worth it for you to touch me like that, just like it was totally worth it to climb the stupid tree in the first place so you’d pay attention to me, so. That’s when I knew, really.” 

Eddie’s eyebrows are doing the thing where he looks kind of angry and kind of thrilled at the same time. He’s beautiful in a way no one else ever has been to Richie; he could stare at his face for hours just to memorize every microexpression. Maybe Eddie will let him do that now. 

“I can’t believe you,” Eddie says, and kisses Richie again, long and slow and clearly determined to get it right. 

“You really have no idea,” Eddie says, several long minutes later, “how crazy it was making me, thinking about you being with him. It was… I didn’t even understand it at first but it felt wrong. Like I knew deep down it was... you and me.” 

“I mean. I know how you feel. You were married, dude. I saw that wedding ring and it was like…” He mimes stabling himself in the heart, and Eddie laughs. 

“Sorry about that,” he says ruefully. “Wouldn’t have done it, if I’d known.” 

It’s clearly meant as a joke, but there’s real pain behind it too. There are a lot of things both of them would have done differently, probably, if they had known. 

“So do you wanna get out of here?” Richie says. “By which I mean the living room. Not Ben’s house in the middle of the night.” 

He’s worried for a moment that it’s too much, too soon, because Eddie’s eyes widen with what looks like shock, but then he nods with surprising eagerness and stands up, pulling Richie with him. 

“Yeah, come on,” he says. “Let’s fucking go.” 

—  
When Eddie wakes up the next morning, Richie’s still asleep. 

He hasn’t fallen asleep next to someone in a long, long time. That was one of the first forms of intimacy quietly phased out of his marriage by mutual agreement that it just wasn’t practical to expect two people who had chosen to spend the rest of their lives together to be compatible at sleeping in the same bed. And maybe it wasn’t, maybe that didn’t by itself signify anything, but Eddie thinks it’s a pretty fucking good feeling to wake up and see Richie lying there with his mouth open slightly, snoring, looking younger without his glasses on. 

“Rich, wake up,” he mutters, which of course accomplishes nothing, so he shakes him by the shoulder a little bit. Richie’s eyes blink open and Eddie sees him look at him in confusion for a moment, which quickly turns into a sleepy, wide-eyed smile. 

“Hey,” Richie says. “So that really happened.” 

God. It did, it was real, and thinking about it is while making direct eye contact is overwhelming enough that Eddie has to sit up and look away from him. 

He can’t think about it too much. He was trying not to think about it too much last night, while it was happening, and Richie kept asking him, “_Is this good, is this okay_?” like he needed to be concerned that Eddie wouldn’t like it instead of that he would like it so much it was terrifying and he felt like he’d never be able to live without it again. 

He feels like what he assumes teenagers feel like, when they’re doing all of this for the first time, except he never did any of it when he was a teenager and when he eventually did it didn’t feel like it was supposed to at all. It never mattered like this. It was all reading from a script before, and now he has the real feelings behind the words for the first time and has no idea what to say.

Richie sits up next to him. He looks worried too, Eddie thinks; he gropes around on the nightstand for his glasses and then squints at his phone. “Fuck, it’s past eleven. I can’t believe they haven’t come looking for us.” 

“Well, it’s not like they all got up at the crack of dawn to see if Santa brought presents. Maybe they’re all still asleep.” As he says it, there’s a loud peal of laughter from elsewhere in the house, and he winces. 

Eddie looks with vague longing at the clothes he was wearing last night, which are scattered along with Richie’s at the foot of the bed. He’s definitely not getting up and getting dressed first and having Richie fucking — look at him while he does it. No way, absolutely not. 

Richie doesn’t seem to have the same hang-ups about that, because he stands up and pulls his t-shirt and sweatpants back on. Eddie barely resists pulling the covers up to his neck like people do in movies. 

Richie looks over at him and clearly doesn’t know what to do next, either, which is kind of reassuring. “Should we do the thing where like, I leave and then you wait ten minutes before you leave so nobody knows we were here together, or —“ 

“Probably,” Eddie says. If everyone knows, that will make it extremely and frighteningly real. 

“Okay,” Richie says, nodding. “Okay, I’ll go first. You want me to do something distracting so you can sort of sneak—“ 

“Don’t overthink it, please,” Eddie says. It sounds more snappish than he means it too. 

Richie’s shoulders slump forward. “Are you, like, really regretting this?” 

He says it lightly, but Eddie knows him better than that, knows the nervous look in his eyes. “No, I‘m not,” he says quietly. “I’ve just never — it’s —“ 

_This is important_, he wants to say, _this is important and I don’t know how to do it right_. 

Richie smiles at him in a way that looks a little sad, a little wistful, and Eddie wonders if he feels the same way, like they’re already missing each other even though they’re both right here. 

“Hey, I got something for you,” Richie says. He digs through his suitcase for a moment and emerges with a small, flat package wrapped in cheery Christmas paper. “I got everyone t-shirts with my face on them but that’s obviously like, a joke thing, this is for you.” 

He sits on the foot of the bed and hands it over, and Eddie is still wishing he had clothes on but he accepts, unwrapping it carefully. He knows it as soon as he sees it, the familiar and poorly-rendered drawing of Magneto in combat with Wolverine and Jean Grey. 

He turns over the front cover and there it is, his old phone number with the Derry, Maine area code written in Sharpie on the inside. 

“This is the one I gave you—“ 

“When I moved away, yeah,” Richie says, adjusting his glasses nervously. 

“Jesus,” Eddie breathes. “How do you still have this?” 

“I asked my mom to go through my stuff at our old place to see if she could find it. She mailed it to me. She didn’t remember you at all when I told her, you know, it was so weird. But when I started describing you, she was like, oh, right, Eddie. She said you were always her favorite.” He laughs. “I said you were mine too.” 

It’s strange — the comic feels like it should be imbued with some kind of power, the way it felt like his inhaler was when they were doing Mike’s made-up ritual. Like touching it should give him the power to go back to 1989, like Wolverine is going to look up and him and tells him he’s learned his lesson and he can start over, do it right this time. 

“Do you think if I’d said something then it would’ve been different?” Eddie says. “Do you think we would’ve — I don’t know. Remembered even a little more.” 

Richie shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I mean, we still would’ve had to leave. Both of us.” 

“I wish…” Eddie starts to say, but he can’t finish the sentence because there are too many things he wishes for.

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Me too.” He smiles sadly and then suddenly Eddie can’t stand that, can’t stand his own thoughts, because it’s not their fault and there’s nothing to regret. They did the best they could, and they still have time, time enough for a better future. 

“Thank you,” Eddie says, not meaning just for the comic book, and he kisses Richie even though neither of them have brushed their teeth, feeling Richie’s surprised smile against his lips. “Alright, now go out there and be normal.” 

“Can do,” Richie promises, springing to his feet. He does finger-guns from the doorway and Eddie grins. The future’s never been closer, and he’s pretty sure it’s going to be good. 

—  
The next couple days pass by in a kind of pleasant haze. They don’t say anything to the others, but it doesn’t exactly feel like sneaking around when Eddie follows Richie to his bedroom two nights in a row. Once, they walk through the threshold of the living room together and Stan points above their heads and says, “Mistletoe,” in a dry and knowing voice. Richie kisses Eddie on the cheek without saying a word. The others barely even react, like it’s just normal, and maybe it is. 

Richie kind of feels like he’s gotten everything he ever wanted. He feels like it can’t possibly last. 

The last day they’re all there, they stay up late drinking even though most of them have flights to catch the next day. After several glasses of wine, Eddie leans his head on Richie’s shoulder during a very rowdy game of Pictionary, the gesture mostly unnoticed because Bev and Mike are yelling at Ben about his inability to artistically convey the concept of “air conditioner.” 

Bill, sitting closest to them, looks over and says, “So are you guys, you know, a thing now?”

Richie freezes up slightly. “Uh—“ 

“That’s not your concern, Bill,” Eddie says with great dignity, not moving an inch. “It’s personal information.” 

Richie, who half expected him to jump a foot into the air and start spluttering denials, bites down on a smug smile. “Yeah, Bill, it’s personal.” 

Bill looks slightly mystified but mostly amused. “Alright,” he says. “I’m happy for you guys.” 

The next morning, though, it occurs to Richie that maybe he should’ve asked Eddie that question himself. They’re waiting for Richie’s cab to the airport to come on the front porch, and he’s already said goodbye to everyone else with promises to see each other soon, but this is the part he’s been dreading. 

“So,” Eddie says hesitantly. 

Richie remembers their awkward goodbyes on the steps of the Derry Townhouse and in the drop-off lane at LAX and even in the driveway of Richie’s childhood home, back when they were kids and they had no power at all over life pulling them apart. 

One of them is always leaving, he thinks, he this time it won’t be permanent, but he still doesn’t know how to say a goodbye that doesn’t feel weighted with all the ones before it. 

“We’ll see each other again soon,” he says instead. “Bill wants us to all come out to London for that screening, and I know you have a real job and it might be hard to get away—“ 

“I’ll figure something out,” Eddie says absently. “It’s fine. You’ll be in New York all the time, right?” 

Richie can be in New York all the time if necessary — he can absolutely do that — so he nods. 

“Good,” says Eddie. He’s looking down at the ground, his hand gripping white-knuckled onto the handle of his suitcase. 

Now would be the moment, Richie thinks, to say something unambiguous and permanent like I love you, like please don’t leave. He’s still biting it back, though. This is all new territory for Eddie and he probably needs the space to figure out what he wants. Just because Richie has known that since he was thirteen doesn’t mean Eddie shouldn’t have all the time he needs. He thinks of Beverly smoking her secret cigarettes where Ben couldn’t see her, and yeah, they seem good now, all secret smiles when they think no one else is looking, but he doesn’t want Eddie worrying like that because of him. His feelings, he thinks, are his own problem. 

But god, he’s going to miss Eddie every minute. 

The distant sound of a car pulling up at the end of Ben’s long driveway punctures through his thoughts, and Eddie looks up at him, startled. “Well,” he says, and only hesitates for a moment before pulling Richie forward by the collar for a brief but decisive kiss goodbye. 

“Call me,” Eddie says, and Richie grins at him, feeling suddenly like the luckiest guy in the world. 

—  
When Eddie gets back to New York, his apartment is empty and quiet and he finds, suddenly, that he hates that. It’s been sort of a refuge, the last few months, a retreat, but now it feels sterile and cold. 

They said goodbye in Wyoming and it felt like the adult, rational thing to do. Their separate lives weren’t going to suddenly merge together just on the strength of wanting them too. 

Except that now he’s actually back home and it feels incredibly fucking stupid that he’s not in Los Angeles, or here with Richie, or anywhere except by himself in his awful divorced-man apartment with its blank white walls. 

What the hell, Eddie thinks. He’s done crazier things this year, objectively. He can do this. He calls into the office, fabricates a sudden family emergency, and buys a plane ticket to Los Angeles. 

The next twenty or so steps in the process, he operates sort of on autopilot. If he’s just focusing on the basic details of travel, he doesn’t have to think about what he’s going to do or say when he gets there. He buys one of Bill’s novels in the airport and spends the whole plane ride reading it; it’s a surprisingly effective distraction, 

The whole thing is intended to be half romantic gesture, half practical joke just to see the look on Richie’s face when he shows up, but by the time the plane lands the practical joke part is entirely forgotten. 

It occurs to him that, even though he double-checked Richie’s website to make sure he didn’t have any tour dates scheduled, there’s no reason he should be at home. He’s not like Eddie in that respect, probably; he doesn’t spend all of his nights alone watching Netflix and drinking rosè. Or maybe he does; Eddie doesn’t know how Richie spends every night, but fuck, he wants to. 

He has to press the button at Richie’s building and ask to be let up, and he’s certain as he’s doing it that Richie is not going to be there and he’ll be stuck standing in the street like an asshole, with nowhere to go, but then Richie’s voice says, “Hello?” 

“Hey,” he says, “it’s me.” 

“_Eddie_?” He sounds like he doesn’t believe it. 

“Uh, yeah. In the flesh, man.” 

There’s no answer except the buzz of the door that means he’s being allowed in. 

The walk up to Richie’s third floor apartment is long enough for Eddie to think of every worst-case scenario where Richie tells him that this is insane or too fast or that they made a mistake and should just go back to the way things were. When he gets to the third floor, Richie is already standing in the doorway, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt with the Flash on it and mismatched socks, and Eddie’s mouth goes dry. 

“Hey,” he says. “I was going to bring you flowers, but then I thought, maybe that would be weird, and also they would basically have to be forget-me-nots, and that’s weirder, so.” 

“What you doing here?” Richie says. He looks sort of struck dumb by it, and he readjusts his glasses like he can’t see Eddie properly. “Is this a _When Harry Met Sally_ thing?” 

“I guess. Except it’s January third, and it would have to be twenty-seven years and six months, which is a really long time.” 

Richie laughs a little. “Okay,” he says, “um, come in.” 

Eddie steps over the threshold and closes the door behind him and they just kind of stare at each other for a long moment. Staring’s maybe the wrong word. Maybe it’s more like gazing. 

“You’re here,” Richie says. “I saw you two days ago.” 

Eddie decides to just be honest. “I missed you.” 

“Enough to fly to L.A.? I — how long are you staying?” 

Eddie should maybe have thought through what he was going to say a little more than he did. “Look,” he says, “look, Rich, my whole life before this year has just been like — the sunk-cost fallacy. I do these things that I don’t really want to do and then I feel like I’ve put so much effort into them that I have to keep doing them but it’s just, at the end of the day it’s just throwing good money after bad and it’s not even a sound business or investing practice so I don’t know why I treat my life like that, I really don’t. Do you know what I mean?” 

“I mean, not really,” Richie says. He’s definitely staring now. 

It feels too big to say out loud, everything he’s feeling, and Eddie makes an impatient hand gesture that doesn’t mean anything and tries to just say it, without worrying so much about how it sounds. 

“I’m just saying I want to — invest in this. I know that’s a stupid metaphor. I know it’s not, it doesn’t seem — smart, or realistic or whatever, but I just think, why shouldn’t I want that, there’s nobody else I want or I love like I love you, and we — I know I’m not an easy person to be with, but if you want that at all, we should. We should…” The words are getting caught in his throat now, his breath catching a little. 

“Eds.” Richie says. His eyes are very wide, behind the glasses, and his mouth is inclining slightly towards a smile. “What exactly are you asking me?” 

“I’m just saying let’s stay together,” Eddie says. “I’ll stay in L.A. or we can go somewhere else if you want, whatever you want, but let’s just — stay together this time.” 

There’s a moment of resounding, awful silence that feels a hundred years long. 

“I was going to come to New York,” Richie says. 

Eddie’s heart almost stops. “What?” 

“I mean, not the fucking second I got home, because I needed to make arrangements or whatever and I was going to tell you because I thought you’d freak out if I just showed up on your doorstep. But I — of course that’s what I want.” He shakes his head and smiles like it’s unbelievable Eddie could doubt this. “Of _course_.” He takes a step closer, sets a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. 

“Oh, thank god,” Eddie says, and throws his arms around him. It takes Richie a moment to catch up, but then he squeezes back so tightly that it actually lifts Eddie off the floor slightly and they unsteadily spin around the foyer of Richie’s tacky, cluttered apartment, which Eddie now loves more than any other place in the world. 

“Love you too,” Richie says after a moment. “Bet you didn’t even notice you said it first, but I did. And you’re not a hard person to love.” His face goes still and serious for a moment. “You make me want to be better, you know, to be good enough for you.” 

Eddie touches the side of Richie’s face carefully, traces the line of his jaw. “We can just be together,” he says, and he can tell Richie knows what he means. They can just make the choice and keep making it and they can just decide that everything else is less important than that. It feels so improbable and so strange and so good.

Richie leans down and kisses him first on the nose and then on the mouth, and Eddie can barely stop smiling long enough to kiss him properly. “Yeah,” Richie says. “We can do that.”

—  
Almost a year to the day after they left Derry for the last time, Bill sends them all a draft of his new book. It’s long as hell and he says it’s “semi-autobiographical,” which turns out to mean it’s just about the literal events of their lives except that he changed the names. There’s a Ken and a Dan and Jake and Waverly, so he wasn’t even creative about it, which is sort of sweet. 

In the book Richie and Eddie are Mitch and Teddie. It’s difficult for Richie to read the parts about himself, because even filtered through how Bill sees him the portrait is accurate enough to hurt. 

He has a lot of empathy, now, for the kid he was in 1989 and the person he was a year ago, but they seem out-of-place here, in Eddie’s New York apartment that has gradually become their apartment. They went with New York, eventually, after a few long arguments in which they each insisted the other shouldn’t have to move. New York is where Eddie’s job is, though, and Richie can do his just as well from either coast, and Ben and Beverly are just one borough over. 

Their apartment is full of evidence that two people live here, Richie’s comic books and a strange antique lamp Eddie got at a flea market because he’s trying to develop his own taste in things like interior decorating, the little magnets they use to pin notes for each other to the fridge. Right now there’s a reminder to buy more oat milk and the schedule for an LGBT short film festival, because that’s the kind of thing they go to now, together. All the building blocks of a real life, a million miles away from Derry, Maine. 

So Richie’s making his way through the book slowly, doing a lot of reading aloud with imitations of their younger selves that make Eddie cringe, but after they’ve had their copies for a couple days Eddie skips ahead to the end. He stalks into the living room where Richie is responding to boring interview questions via email, waving the book around indignantly. 

“You’re not gonna believe this,” Eddie says, irate, and shoves the passage under Richie’s nose so he has to read it. 

He does, and he has to stifle a laugh when Eddie keeps looking at him like Bill has committed a criminal offense. 

“What?” Richie says. “What’s wrong with this, I think it’s very sweet.” 

“Sweet!” Eddie is incensed. “It’s not what happened!” 

In Bill’s version of the story, “Mitch” gets caught in the deadlights just like Richie did in real life, but instead of just getting shocked out of it when Eddie throws the spear, this version of Eddie has to kiss him to jolt him back into consciousness. It’s very romantic. 

“Yeah, but you have to admit that it’s way better. I mean, the narrative parallels with Ken and Waverly—“ 

“Just say Ben and Beverly, oh my god—“ 

“Just way better drama and romance than we accomplished in real life, Eds, so much better. Why didn’t this happen in real life?” 

Eddie scowls. “Because you were fine, idiot, I didn’t need to kiss you.” Richie pouts, and Eddie throws up his hands. “Obviously I would have, if I had to! But what is Bill doing imagining better ways that we could’ve kissed!” 

“You want him to write a fifty-page epilogue about how long it took us to get a clue?” 

“I mean, if he wants to be true to life, yes.” 

Richie can’t help grinning in response to Eddie’s adorable angry eyebrows. “It’s a good ending,” he says. 

“It’s so trite,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. “Oh, we have to make sure to tie up all the loose threads so everybody gets a happy ending at the same exact moment. Life doesn’t work like that.” 

Which is fair, because it is their life, sort of — but it’s also a story. Stories have neat endings and life’s not about endings, really. It’s mostly about middles. Richie’s thankful he doesn’t write novels, that his own narrative of their lives can just be about the awkward in-between parts. There’s where all the humor is. 

“Let him have it, Eds,” Richie says, laughing, and takes the book out of his hands. “We have to tell him it’s good so he’ll let me play myself in the movie.” 

“I’m not letting you play yourself in the movie if you have to kiss some other guy who’s pretending to be me,” Eddie says. 

“Maybe if you start taking acting classes now you’ll be up for playing yourself,” Richie says, and leans over to kiss him before he can come up with an indignant response. 

It’s not an ending. Endings are always going to be sad, because even if you get everything else right and assuming you’re not one of those old couples who love each other so much that they die in their sleep on the same night, somebody always call to leave first. But Eddie knows his actuarial tables and he says they’ve got plenty of years of middles ahead of them. Statistically, he says, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t someday have been together again for longer than they were apart, and Richie believes it. 

“I still hate it,” Eddie says after a moment. “I’m going to tell him that, I want that opinion on the record.” 

“I’m going to tell him not to change a thing,” Richie says. “It’s a good story. Real version’s just for us.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry to Steve from the 2010 script for making him have to play the romantic false lead in this narrative it seems like he already put up with a lot... I imagine he has met someone who is much less of a disaster than Richie and is telling everyone stories about his ex who never wanted to commit and then got married a year after they broke up. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! I'm on tumblr @ spacesocialist! Bye!


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